


bodies made of doing what we can

by lovelyorbent



Series: they will know me by my teeth. [4]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Butch Spike, Childe/Sire Bond(s), F/F, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Souled Vampire(s), Suicidal Thoughts, basically just me being mean to spike, chapter four is where i become unbearably artsy, philosophical musings of me, semi-graphic descriptions of dead bodies within, the first evil trying to jettison our leading lady from the scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:48:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28817313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyorbent/pseuds/lovelyorbent
Summary: Spike hadn’t felt it the first time she had died, too high on the joy of Dru’s fangs, the dizziness of exsanguination. She had fallen asleep in Dru’s arms, and had woken up in them, too. All around, the experience was less horror than bliss.But getting her soul back felt like how she imagined dying should have. It slammed into her body, burning so brightly she couldn’t hold back a cry as it seared through her, settling inside her bones in a way it hadn’t in over a hundred years, making a too-big space for itself within her. She didn’t recall falling, but she was aware of the ground under her hands and knees as she shuddered through the aftershocks of its return, nearly choking on the sensation of all the lives inside her body.When the physical pain stopped, the screaming began. A hundred thousand screams over the years, people she’d killed, people she’d tortured, blood she’d bathed in. It was paralyzing, horrifying, to feel it all like a bruise being pressed on, when before she had only cared about it in the abstract.The mouth of the cave was right there, and it was bright outside. God, the light. The light could help.She dragged herself towards it, and went mad before she touched the sun.
Relationships: Angel & Spike (BtVS), Drusilla & Spike (BtVS), Spike & Dawn Summers, Spike/Buffy Summers
Series: they will know me by my teeth. [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1983988
Comments: 40
Kudos: 33





	1. yellow bile.

**Author's Note:**

> this is NOT done yet but i wanted to start posting it anyway even tho that's risky with my terrible attention span. but it's been partially done for like a month now and i love the first like ~2 chapters (3 needs work, 4 is a total blank). will post weekly, if everything goes well for me.
> 
> obviously i'm fucking heavily with the timeline at this point so if you read this and are like hey, that doesn't make any sense with the show: yes, you are right. i do have explanations for most of the things i changed, timeline-wise, but at some point it's just me delicately throwing large parts of season 7 and all of ats into a garbage can and setting them on fire

Spike hadn’t felt it the first time she had died, too high on the joy of Dru’s fangs, the dizziness of exsanguination. She had fallen asleep in Dru’s arms, and had woken up in them, too. All around, the experience was less horror than bliss.

But getting her soul back felt like how she imagined dying should have. It slammed into her body, burning so brightly she couldn’t hold back a cry as it seared through her, settling inside her bones in a way it hadn’t in over a hundred years, making a too-big space for itself within her. She didn’t recall falling, but she was aware of the ground under her hands and knees as she shuddered through the aftershocks of its return, nearly choking on the sensation of all the lives inside her body.

When the physical pain stopped, the screaming began. A hundred thousand screams over the years, people she’d killed, people she’d tortured, blood she’d bathed in. It was paralyzing, horrifying, to feel it all like a bruise being pressed on, when before she had only cared about it in the abstract.

The mouth of the cave was right there, and it was bright outside. God, the light. The light could help.

She dragged herself towards it, and went mad before she touched the sun.

**_One month earlier._ **

The pain in her head had been extraordinary, but when she woke up, blinking, it was gone. Buffy was sitting there next to the bed, chewing on her lip, looking — well, not worried. But then, she wouldn’t really expect her to _be_ worried, in a practical sense. There wasn’t much of anything short of a beheading or a sharp wooden object that could take Spike out.

The odd thing was that from the furrow of her brow she looked _guilty_. Spike looked at her for a moment, unmoving, and Buffy didn’t notice that her eyes had opened just yet — she considered the lean strong lines of Buffy’s body, the way she seemed almost nervous, and wondered what the hell conversation was coming. It couldn’t be the breakup one, because Buffy had been all kinds of cool for that one. When she didn’t love, she was perfectly happy to say it, and plainly, and hurtfully, and often. So, something else. The last thing she remembered was the searing pain, and then nothing.

“Buffy, love,” she started, and Buffy’s head snapped up, showing her pretty green eyes all dark and tired like they were so often these days. “How’s tricks?”

“Oh, you’re awake,” Buffy said, with a smile like a summer breeze. It was a fleeting expression, the uneasiness came back right away. “How do you feel?”

“’bout normal. Bit hungry.”

Buffy passed over a bag, which she had apparently been keeping warm between her thighs. Sweet girl, Spike thought, still studying her face shrewdly. It tasted like anticoagulants when she bit into it — hospital blood, then — but it was body-warm and human, and that was more than she had expected. Buffy, though, Buffy wasn’t quite looking her in the eye.

Spike sighed, and sat up, yawning. Her head gave a little warning ache, and she reached for the back of her head and felt a still-healing wound. “So what happened? Am I dying? How long d’I have to live, doc?”

“Um, you were,” Buffy said. Spike frowned. That shouldn’t be possible. Even with the chip malfunctioning — unless it burned off her head, it should just keep her in bloody pain all the time. “The chip was all fritzy. So Riley’s guys fixed it.”

Maybe that was it, she thought Spike was jealous. Now that she was thinking about it, she _could_ smell bloody corn pone around here. Eau de overcompensation. Maybe she was a bit jealous, but only in the sense that she’d rather soldier boy and his soldier toys didn’t come around here anymore, and she’d wished she’d gotten to tell them that in no uncertain terms. Preferably with her arm around Buffy, but that was negotiable. “Huh. So, it’s — ”

“Fixed,” Buffy told her, nodding. “No more random headaches.”

“Just the deserved ones, huh?”

Buffy squirmed, a sort of motion that Spike generally associated with her pressing those pretty little thighs together to stifle her arousal. It wasn’t for that this time; Buffy didn’t smell turned on in the slightest. “That’s the idea.”

“Wish they could just take the bloody thing out. Don’t believe it can’t be done.”

This time the twitch in the Slayer’s body was unmistakable. Spike blinked at her, and then narrowed her eyes, reading every little guilty muscle quiver, even though Buffy was doing an admirably good job holding still and acting cool.

“ — Buffy.”

“Yeah?”

“Something you’re not saying?”

The mumble that got her was too low even for vampire ears.

“Speak up, love.” There was a cold feeling in her chest, and it was beginning to spread the longer Buffy didn’t answer her. She kept her voice pitched low and comforting, the same croon she used on victims she was seducing into alleys back in the bad old days. “I won’t be mad.”

“They said they could either fix it or remove it,” Buffy said all in a rush, and on any other day, Spike might have had mercy, given the Slayer’s obvious discomfort and shame. But the blinding anger went through her too fast for her to think before the next words came out of her mouth.

“And you told them to keep me your bloody trained pet? Put in some new protocols? Do I fucking roll over and beg now? Or, I know, maybe you told ‘em to just take out the whole bloody frontal lobe. If ol’ Spike can’t make decisions for herself she can’t make the wrong one, is that right?”

“I _knew_ you’d be upset.”

“I’m _so_ sorry I bloody lied to you about how I’d feel about finding out my girl thinks I’m a brainless killing machine who doesn’t deserve to be able to sodding defend herself!”

“I don’t think that!”

“Tell me what you _were_ thinking, then, Slayer. Walk me through your _mental process_ for deciding to keep my balls dangling on the end of your leash when I’ve done nothing but prove I’ve changed, over and over and bloody over.”

Buffy was silent, lip quivering. Finally, she opened her mouth, forming the beginning of the word _not_ , and Spike _knew_. Knew every bloody thought that had flown through that pretty golden head of hers while she had been lying on the ground like a useless sodding lump.

“Oh.” Spike’s teeth ached in her skull, wanting to be buried in something hot and yielding, as if the rush of a good kill would take away the pain. Her voice felt like it was coming from very far away. “That’s it, then. You don’t believe it.”

“I believe you’re trying,” Buffy told her quickly. “But not everyone — ”

Spike managed to keep down the snarl that was ripping at the insides of her throat, but didn’t quite keep the fury from her voice. “Get out, Buffy.”

“Spike.”

The snarl tore free. “I said _get out_.”

“No. Not until — ”

“Did the fix include rectifying how it glitches around you?”

Buffy frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s not find out.”

At that, Buffy’s jaw tightened, and she stood up and left the room with angry, jerky motions, leaving a swirl of jasmine perfume in her wake. Usually that scent would have made Spike miss her right away, but for the moment, all she could focus on was the relentless tightening in her chest.

**_Present day._ **

It was night when she woke, and the cave was as empty as it had been when she had arrived, no remnants of the trials, no demons here except for her. She could feel a prickling sensation at the base of her neck that meant family, but they weren’t anywhere nearby. The space at the nape of her neck that meant danger was silent. The screaming never bloody stopped; it was a wonder she could feel anything past the overwhelming crush of guilt.

She stumbled upright, dizzy, and took a few aching steps forward, then sprawled forward onto the dirt outside the cave, turning over to watch the stars spin above her.

There had been a girl in Paris in the twenties, whose husband Dru had turned. They had kept her around a few days feeding on her, and when he’d woken up, he’d sucked her dry while she begged him to stop until there wasn’t enough strength left in her to beg. There had been a girl in Montreal. There had been a girl in Milan. A girl in Vienna, and in Prague, and in Paris again. So many girls. Some who didn’t care they were dying, who were so used up already that they couldn’t even pretend to want to live. Some who barely knew what was happening, so strung out they could hardly see the fangs as they descended towards their throats. And some — some who cried. Who had had families, and lives, and dreams that she had snuffed out without remorse.

Not even _without remorse_ , not even just that. She had liked those best. There hadn’t been any _fun_ in the ones who hadn’t cared, who hadn’t known.

There was nothing in her stomach, so the retching didn’t bring anything up. When it stopped, she was ravenous. She wanted a kill. God, even with a soul, she wanted a kill. What the fuck was wrong with her? Her fangs were itching for it. It had been days. Weeks, maybe. How long had it been? A vampire couldn’t die of starvation, but they could go mad from it.

Maybe she was mad already. She closed her eyes against the wheeling stars and waited for the sun.

**_Two months earlier._ **

The stars over Restfield were silent and still, and Buffy’s hand was warm in hers. Somewhere in the distance, a motorcycle was starting, and under their feet, some of the grave dirt was shifting.

It was rare, these days, to get Buffy to herself, what with all the kiddies running around. They hadn’t had a proper shag in weeks, but the soft, easy parts of her were happy just with this, walking hand in hand with her through the graveyard, Buffy lost in thought and not paying her a lick of attention. This was the only mouthful of quiet the girl got these days, and Spike never broke it with unnecessary chatter, just smoked while Buffy stared at the stars.

“What’s that?” Buffy asked, the first words in over an hour.

Spike looked in the direction of her finger. “Cygnus. The swan. His lover flew too close to the sun and he dug the bones out of the river.”

“Not the constellation, Spike, the thing in front of it.”

“Oh, right. I dunno. Not a bird, a plane, or Superman. Plenty of things fly, love.”

“Yeah, but it looks funny.”

Spike squeezed her hand. “Well, unless you’ve grown wings in the last little bit, nothing we can do about it until it comes down.”

Buffy dropped her hand to rifle through her bag of tricks and pulled out a crossbow.

“I stand corrected.”

“Tell me about Cygnus,” Buffy said, taking aim.

“Well, like I said, he was the lover of Helios’ — that’s the sun god — son. The boy — Phaethon — begged his father to be able to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky, and Helios, the bloody idiot, said yes. But Phaethon had bit off more than he could chew. Lost control of the thing, and Zeus had to shoot him down out of the sky.”

Buffy fired as if on cue, her body hunter-still and beautiful in the moonlight. For a moment, they both watched the bolt fly, and then the shape in the sky began to fall.

“The chariot, thundershot, fell into the river below, and the waters turned toxic. They say even now it boils, so hot that anything flying over it falls dead. Like an infected wound, belching poison.” They began to walk in the direction where the thing had fallen, Buffy putting the crossbow back as they did so. “Now, Cygnus was upset he couldn’t give his lad a proper burial, because the body was laid at the bottom of the river. So he went down to the bank, and he dove in to fish out the bones, day after day, until he’d gathered them all.”

“Into the boiling river?”

“I like to imagine it bloody hurt. Think it’s more romantic that way. Love that burns after death.”

“Spike?”

“Yeah, pet?”

“If I ever die in a toxic river, please just leave my bones there.”

“Absolutely bloody not. I’ve learned my lesson about leaving your bones anywhere.”

Buffy laughed. It had been a while since she had heard the sound, and Spike dipped her head to kiss her.

“I love you,” Buffy said. “But I’m leaving your dust in the river.”

“Good choice. There’s already a hunter constellation. No room for you up there.”

**_Present day._ **

She woke this time to the sensation of a hand slipping through her hair, fingers tangled in her curls, and when she looked up, she saw Dru’s pale, angular face, her dark empty eyes. “Dru?” she croaked, and then shut her eyes against the reflected light from the sun outside the cave. From the looks of the ground, Dru had dragged her back inside.

“Spike is a bad dog,” Dru told her matter-of-factly, staring into her eyes. “Trying to be a girl again. Trying to touch the sunshine.”

“Dru,” she said again, and then she was sobbing into Dru’s belly, hands tight against her hips, holding her there. The things she had _done_ to this woman. Loved her to death and back, but they had spent all those years tearing into each other. How could you do some of the things they had done to someone you loved? Dru cooing in pleasure while some other person touched her, knowing it was ripping Spike up inside. Spike with the face of a monster, chaining her to a wall and making her bleed so many times they had all blurred together. “Dru, baby — ”

“Shh-hh-hh-hh-hh.” There was a cool, slim finger against her lips. “Our Father who art in heaven,” she said, sing-song and sticky sweet. “Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The Lord’s prayer fell from her lips like pearls, like rubies of blood dropping off her fangs, and she looked for a moment like that holy girl she must have been when Angelus had made her. She slid her palm against Spike’s mouth, over her face, stopping when her wrist rested against her lips. “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

It was obvious what she wanted. Spike was too hungry to resist, and she bit into Dru’s veins without hesitation, feeling the cold sweetness of sire’s blood, the blood of their line, thick on her tongue, her teeth. The coppery taste that came from whoever Dru had last killed.

Dru sighed, a little blissful thing. “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Spike wrenched her mouth from its purchase, and scrambled away to retch again. It came up red and sluggish, splattering on the stones, seeping into the light from the mouth of the cave.

“Waste,” Dru hissed from behind her. “Waste, waste. And I, all alone in the dark.”

“You don’t want this, Dru.”

“Neither did Daddy.”

There had been a girl once inside each of them who would have been horrified by this scene. The blood on the rocks, the screaming in Spike’s head. Discussing Dru’s torturer, and her savior, and the brightness burning inside Spike that wouldn’t stop scorching. “No, s’ppose not,” she said, mind absent, lost somewhere in a hundred years of bloody murder. Where was she? She couldn’t remember what country this was. Barely remembered the continent.

Dru was behind her again, tugging her back into the shadow of the cave, arms iron around her waist, mouth open against her neck and fangs pricking her skin. _Tear my head off, love_ , Spike thought. _Tear it off. Go on. Do it. You made me; unmake me_. “But my dark lover wanted to turn into a pumpkin again. Wanted a holiday from temptation, but got a ticket one-way.”

In a hundred and twenty years Spike had gotten so good at translating Dru’s crazy speak that it usually didn’t take any effort at all, but with her head spinning so, it was difficult to know what the bloody hell was going on. “Why are you here, princess?”

“My good puppy didn’t come when called. Called me instead.”

Spike choked on another round of weeping, and Dru cradled her close, laying her head down against her breasts like they had together a thousand times, curled up in the same bed, only this time it didn’t feel like perfect love. “I don’t feel good, Dru.”

Dru bent, her dark hair falling in a curtain around their faces, and the scent of it brought back memories of lying with Dru in a bed with two corpses, blood streaked on the sheets, the two of them wet with it and each other. Her voice was soft and sweet, high like a child’s, when she answered. “You aren’t good.”

**_One month earlier_**.

“Never bloody good enough,” she spat, and stalked around the open hole to the lower level of the crypt, throwing back a mouthful of whiskey. “No matter what I bloody do. Never bloody good enough for the Chosen Girl and her stupid… Chosen… friends — ”

The crypt around her was silent. Empty. She searched her mind for someone to talk to, someone whose company she wanted at the moment, but came up empty. She had never had anyone to talk about these easily-hurt softer feelings that were lurking like parasites inside her in her glory days, and now the only people she might have talked to them about were the people she was having them about in the first place. It was a situation that called for getting hammered and crying on a stranger at a pub, but given her Slayer-adjacent status, that sort of thing wasn’t exactly safe these days. Not to mention that it would get back to Buffy in about two shakes of Willy’s tail.

 _Slayer ruins everything_ , she thought bitterly, and tossed the empty glass to the ground with such force that it went practically to shimmering glass dust.

Once she would have known exactly what to do in this situation. The person she had been even five years ago wouldn’t have hesitated a damn second. Would have killed Buffy in half a instant, when she least expected it, proved her right without even blinking. If you were going to be punished, after all, you might as well deserve it. The thought made her sick now — sick with wanting, sick with revulsion.

She imagined trying to explain this to the Spike of five years ago.

 _You’re in love with the Slayer_.

A laugh. _Bullshit. I’m in love with Dru. Always will be_.

_You’re going to find something more important. And you’re going to fight for it._

_Well, of course I am. I’m a fighter, I am._

_Somebody’s going to take that away from you. Leave you just a lover. And the Slayer’ll give you the time of day once it happens. And you’re going to tumble headlong into her until you’re so tangled up you can’t get out._

_I kill Slayers. Don’t love ‘em._

_You haven’t known this one yet. She changes everything. Changes you._

The conversation lost its luster at that, and Spike choked on something that felt like her first grief since the day she had seen Buffy’s body broken open on the stone under the tower.

It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough.

Because Buffy didn’t understand. _Couldn’t_. It was easy for her, being good. Doing good. She didn’t have a selfish bone in her body. She’d sent her first love straight to hell, because it had to be done. Thrown herself to her death without hesitation, because it had to be done. Buffy was a good girl. And so she couldn’t understand why Spike _wasn’t_. Couldn’t be.

She could make noise about changing. And she _had_ changed. She had moved the heaven and earth inside of her for Buffy. But it wasn’t ever going to be enough, because it was never going to be written into her. It was always going to be a thought process, never an instinct, and Buffy would never, ever be able to wrap that beautiful head of hers around that.

If it were Spike standing in front of Acathla, and Buffy at the mouth of hell with the world hanging on the razor’s edge, Spike would drop the sword and kiss her, and kiss her, and kiss her.

And that just wasn’t bloody good enough.

Not for the Slayer.

**_Present day._ **

Dru walked back into the cave at early nightfall, a woman trailing behind her with long dark hair and skin that shone under the moon. Her bare breasts were full and her stomach bore the marks of pregnancy; there was a child, or children, waiting at home for her and a vacant look in her eyes that meant Dru had her under a thrall. “I brought us a meal,” purred Dru, and Spike crawled frantically to get away from her, towards the back of the cave. “My naughty darling is hungry.”

And she was. So hungry that the scent of blood pumping inside the woman almost made her stomach growl. But she bit into her own hand to keep from moving towards her, deep into the sinew and tendons, and rocked through a spasm of horror.

Dru frowned, and then her eyes went far away. “Puppy’s still housetrained,” she said, as if that explained everything, and reached forward to cut the woman’s throat with a single easy motion of her finger. Spike cried out a moment too late, and the woman crumpled, red spilling from her.

She was too hungry to fight the lure, fumbling like a fledgling, face bloody when she raised it from the gash in the woman’s neck. Dru looked at her and smiled, and she began to vomit again.

**_One year ago._ **

Spike bit her bluntly, and the Slayer screamed through her orgasm, echoing against the walls of the crypt, and her nails ripped through the skin of Spike’s back, releasing the scent of blood into the air. “Oh god, oh god,” Buffy was panting, as Spike slowed her thrusts, prolonging the orgasm on the edge of the cliff and pushing her towards another one with no lull in between. “Spike, please — ”

“That’s right, Slayer, beg me,” she said, and bit her again.

“You can — can — ”

She turned her head, baring the side of her neck, and Spike knew what she was being offered. Slayer blood, honeyed with sex. Offered like a pittance, because Buffy didn’t care about her body anymore. And she wanted to be hurt. Wanted this to be about the monster.

Instead of dropping her fangs, Spike opened her mouth against the pulse of Buffy’s neck, kissing the skin, letting her feel the edges of her teeth, non-sharp, non-deadly. She wouldn’t say no — she never said no to Buffy — but she would pretend she hadn’t noticed the gesture. If the Slayer wanted it, she’d have to ask for it.

She didn’t. Of course she didn’t. Too ashamed of wanting it.

“Please,” Buffy moaned, and Spike kept her teeth from elongating only by the thinnest possible thread of self-control. She wasn’t a bloody animal. She wasn’t going to give Buffy the satisfaction of acting like one.

“Give us another one, kitten,” she said instead, and plowed into her at full strength, jarring another shriek from her as Buffy came, so oversensitive that it had to hurt.

**_Present day._ **

Dru left the body there, and on the second day it started to smell. When the stars came out, Spike went out into the night and began to dig with her hands in the red dirt. She got lost in the grave as it grew underneath her, so little blood in her body that her hands barely bled when she scraped them to the bone on the stones in the ground.

She had never dug a grave before. Not once. She had discarded bodies like tissues, in the street. None of her victims had graves at all, unless some stranger had cared enough to give them one. She had never been interested in the sort of delayed gratification that Angelus sometimes favored, the psychological horror of the prey digging their own grave. It had been the blood that thrilled her.

Dru sat on the side of the grave, cross-legged and singing, and brought her a rabbit just before the sun rose, with its neck broken.

It tasted like shit. Animal blood always did. But it was blood, and, barely sated, she managed to sleep through the day when Dru herded her back into the cave.

The next night she finished the grave, and walked back to get the body, now rotting, off the floor of the cave. “A good Christian burial,” Dru cooed as she stepped back inside, having grown bored of watching her dig. She had been sure Dru would go out hunting. She had been wondering if it made her worse, not to stop her from doing it, but then she realized there wasn’t any way to be worse, not really, than she already was. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”

“Go away, Dru,” she said, feeling tired. More tired than she had since Buffy had died, the summer she had barely slept. Why was Dru even here? What was keeping her in the cave?

A deep voice came from behind her. “Will.”

She whirled, and there was the shape of Angel in the mouth of the cave. Tall, broad. His face in the dark was sad and still, and her heart went to her throat, the bile rising in her again. Maybe now she could die. Maybe now he would kill her. He owed her the pain. Owed her the death. “How — ”

“You called,” he said. “And I promised Buffy I would tell her if you came back.”

Spike’s breath caught in her throat. “She’s not — ”

“She’s not here. You called our line, not the Slayer,” Angel repeated, his voice soft, nonconfrontational. “What did you do, Will?”

Spike fell to her knees before the body, and gathered it into her arms, feeling the too-soft dead skin against her bare chest, her gorge rising at the way the neck yawned open as the head tipped back over her arm. “Forgive me, Father,” she said, sarcasm dragging out of her like blood. He was the last person she wanted to see, but somehow she was glad he was here all the same. “For I have sinned.” She carried the body towards the mouth of the cave, and passed him, walking out to the grave.

The body dropped into it with a meaty thud, and she nearly heaved again. “I watched you dig,” Angel murmured, standing beside the mouth of it. “Why?”

“I have had impure thoughts,” Spike said, nonsensically, as she looked at the body. “I have stolen. I have lied. I have murdered. I have been prideful, and I have lusted, and I am a creature of greed.”

Angel looked her in the eye, and his brows furrowed. “You have a soul. What happened?”

“Won it,” she told him, and started to kick dirt back into the grave. The sound of it hitting the body made her shudder. “If you can call it winning.”

“Why?”

“For the girl,” she said, and fell, tumbling into the grave.

**_One month earlier._ **

All her glassware lay in shards around her. The crypt was a worse mess than it had been since she’d moved in and tidied up, and she sat in the middle of it, drunk and aching, until there was a knock on the door.

It wasn’t Buffy. Buffy never knocked. She opened the door, and there was Tara. She blinked, and frowned, and wondered if she was drunk enough to be seeing things. She hadn’t even known that the witch knew where she lived. “What d’you want, Glinda?”

“Buffy wanted to check up on you.”

Spike barked out a laugh. “Guess you drew the short straw.”

“No. I volunteered.”

“Want a drink?”

“Um, no thanks.”

“Then scamper, pet. And tell the Slayer to run her own bloody errands.”

“Can I come in?”

Spike stepped out of the doorway, and watched Tara walk forward and take in the ruins of the room. There was a murmur, and a sweep of the witch’s hand, and the glass shards gathered themselves up into a neat glittering pile.

“So what else does the bitch want?”

Tara’s eyebrows furrowed at that. If she had been Willow, Spike thought, she would have already whipped into her monologue about the b-word. Instead she shifted uncomfortably on her feet. “Nothing. I just — we were all talking about how upset Buffy is. Which is true. But, I just realized, you know. No one asked how you were feeling. And I wanted to tell you that — I’m sorry.”

It was probably the whiskey, but Spike found herself desperately wanting to hug her. Instead she flopped down on the couch and shrugged one shoulder. “Sweet of you.”

The girl’s voice was soft and hesitant. Sweet; Tara was always sweet. “I know how it feels to be treated like you’re dangerous.”

“Nah, love, you don’t.” Spike raised the bottle to her mouth again and figured, the hell with it. Tara wasn’t an impartial party, but she was what was available. “Because you weren’t _actually_ dangerous, were you. Just a bunch of tossers lying to you to keep you in your place.”

“But I believed it.”

“You were a little girl, ‘course you did. Difference is, Buffy’s right about me. Only reason I wouldn’t hurt you lot if I had it out is because I know it’d make her sad. I don’t give two shakes of a rat’s arse about any of you but her. Slayer dies, you’re back on the menu.”

Tara’s lips pressed together, white and thin. “I don’t think so.”

“I’ve got a hundred and twenty odd years of history that think different.”

“We don’t know each other that well,” Tara told her. “I think maybe this is the first time we’ve been alone. But — I saw you that summer. With Dawn. I don’t think this is the sort of change that disappears when Buffy dies. And I’m not saying that I want the chip out, necessarily. Just, I wanted to say that — I don’t think you’d hurt us, even without it. And that I’m not scared of you.”

“You’re a good girl, Glinda. You and Buffy and all of them.” Spike looked over at her. “But you haven’t got the first clue what you’re talking about. You _should_ be scared.”

“You love her.”

Spike blinked. That was the first time any of them had said it, with the exception of the Summers girls. The rest of them were still firmly on the train of _soulless is heartless_. Her answer came out choked. “To death. And back, if you lot so choose.”

Tara padded across the floor, and sat down on the couch next to her, and then bent to where she was lying and wrapped her arms around her. “Sometimes Buffy’s not right.”

Spike squeezed her eyes shut, but didn’t shove her off. “This isn’t one of those times.”

It wasn’t until the words were out of her mouth that she realized they were true. She bit her lip with fangs, and blood flooded her mouth.

**_Present day._ **

There was blood in her mouth. It tasted like — she opened her eyes and found that she was huddled against Angel’s side, her fangs in his neck, suckling there unconsciously. She released him immediately, and he looked down at her, as if snapped out of some reverie. Dru was sleeping curled up in his lap, and Spike wiped her mouth, puzzled and nauseous.

“She said you weren’t eating,” he whispered, and Spike crawled away from the two of them to huddle against the opposite wall. “I know why.” He tipped his head to draw her eyes to the side of his neck, the clean open holes there, and his voice went bitter. “Cruelty-free.”

Spike laughed and it came out a cough. And then she was hysterical, lying flat on her back and staring at the ceiling of the cave while her body spasmed, wracked with laughter that felt like it was crushing her lungs. “Would the rat say that?”

“Do you care?”

The truth was that she didn’t. The truth was that while the bloodstained years of her soullessness were shaded dark and horrible now, she still remembered the rush. The power and joy of the hunt, of the kill. And Christ, wasn’t that the tell. Even with a soul, the thought made her mouth water. All those lives were real to her now, were valuable, and she _still_ remembered taking them with pleasure, even though the pleasure came drenched in guilt.

The laughter turned into sobbing, and she curled away from him, wishing she could flee the cave, but no, it was daylight.

“How did you do it, Will?” he asked, when she stopped shaking.

She could feel Dru’s eyes on her back now, and she wished, so strongly it almost toppled her, that she still loved Dru the way she always had. Everything had always been so easy then. Love Dru, love Dru, love Dru. Dru had been her entire world. She had never had to make a choice; she had always known she would pick Dru in the end. Buffy — Buffy didn’t want to be her world like that. Buffy wanted her to care about other things. About _the right thing_.

It was so much simpler to care about nothing but her girl. But when she turned over and met Dru’s eyes she didn’t feel it. There was a ragged hollow space inside her where Dru had carved herself free.

“I fought for it,” she said, voice rough like she hadn’t spoken in a thousand years. “Right here. There were trials. I passed them, and he gave it back. And Christ, Angelus, it hurts. It hurts so much.”

He studied her, steady and even. “How is that possible?”

“It wasn’t as hard as you’d think.” Her laugh was harsh in her throat. “I wanted it.”

A wry smile. “And nothing stands between you and what you want.”

“I thought it was going to fix everything. Thought I could show her.”

“Show her what?”

“What I am.”

“Which is?”

“Exactly what she always thought I was.”


	2. black bile.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this fic is basically just me being like hey, fuck canon and also spike, just as a general matter

As soon as night fell, Angel led them out of the cave, like little children, following him quiescently. She didn’t care where they were going. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except the blood on her hands. But then: “We’re going home,” he said, and she stopped walking.

“No.”

In his Sire’s voice: “Do as I say, Will.”

“Home?” Dru chirped.

“California,” Angel told her, and she frowned. “I’ve been away too long already.”

How long had it been? Time had been passing in sluggish pulses and then again in bright rushes since she had left Buffy’s side. She stayed where she was, standing still at the edge of the village, and swayed on her feet, delirious under the night sky. How many times had she killed under these stars? How many lives had they watched her take?

The human psyche wasn’t built to survive something like this, and where it counted, Spike had always been, and always would be, too human. “Will,” said Angel, and the irritated undertone to his voice snapped her out of her trance, the same way it always had. The same way he had surely intended it to. “ _Move_.”

“I can’t see her,” she told him, and distantly felt annoyed at the desperate plea in her own voice. “I can’t, Sire, please don’t make me.”

“No one makes my prince but me,” said Dru, purring, and then, giggling, yanked her forward, so hard she nearly lost her balance and fell into Angel.

Angel’s face was hard and impassive, but there was, maybe, something like sympathy lurking behind his eyes. “Maybe you can’t. But _I_ have responsibilities.”

There was steel in his voice and blood on the plane he led them to, and Spike drank it, curled up in her seat while Dru looked out the window, watching the world pass them by.

**_Three weeks earlier._ **

She could have called Angel. Maybe she should have, to get the lay of the land. But then again, he had never done what she was about to do. Maybe no one had. After all, what sort of idiot vampire _wanted_ a soul?

One who was in love with the Slayer.

The train in Egypt smelled nearly the same as the one in New York where she had killed Nikki Wood. More piss, maybe, less alcohol. No scent of Slayer in the blood-heat of death.

As far as she knew, there was only one vampire in the history of the world who had had a soul. She had never done much research on the subject until this last week, and what she had found wasn’t particularly forthcoming. She had even called the Watcher’s Council pretending to be Giles — she could do his voice dead on — and found nothing but a treatise that some eager little bunny had written about the great ponce himself. When that had proved fruitless, she had turned to researching vampires, which felt bloody odd given that she was one and had never had much need to figure out what she could and could not do.

The books were full of bunk. She’d like to see one actually written by a vampire. If this was the rot they had the Slayer reading, it was no wonder she’d been so bloody sure vampires were incapable of deeper emotion.

 _The vampyre has no room inside of it for mercy or compassion. It is a machine perfectly designed for killing_.

“Please, I have mercy all the bloody time,” she muttered.

And, all right, so she was having trouble thinking of an example.

 _The daemon animating its fleshe eclipses all desires except those moste carnal_.

Well, fine. Maybe.

 _It has no deeper human emotion, no love, sympathy, or grief. It is only an empty shell of the man it once was_.

Spike snapped the book shut. And if that was true, how could you explain the tearing in her chest when she had seen Buffy lying on the ground beneath the tower? If that was true, what had Dru been to her? What was Buffy?

It was _love_. Great _bloody_ love, and no doubt about it.

She stared out the train window into the darkness and wondered how love could possibly be different than, more than, this.

**_Present day._ **

By the time they touched down in LA, Dru was sleeping against her side, and it felt, in some ways, like a little piece of the past. Except now the place on her neck where Dru had bitten her, the gift she had always been so grateful for, throbbed when she touched it, and not comfortingly as it had in the past. She had loved being a vampire, every sodding day of it. Even the days when Dru had made her miserable, every miserable moment of them had been better than being _nothing_ again. But this, this was worse than being nothing. Now the soul was clawing at the demon inside her, white-hot with righteous anguish. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

The airfield was dark, and when Dru failed to stir, looking like a beautiful corpse, Angel rolled his eyes and Spike, as she always had, bent to gather her sire up in her arms, trying to pretend that the bloody fucking parasite inside her wasn’t shredding her, berating her for holding this killer against her chest like a little girl. The air in LA was hot and smelled faintly like the sea, and as soon as she hit the bottom of the stairs, she froze, not wanting to step onto California soil. Angel, stepping behind her, pushed her gently that last step, knowing she wouldn’t stumble and drop Dru, guiding her with a hand on the back of her neck across the asphalt.

The hotel room he led them to was done all in white and green, and when Spike looked at it, all she could see was how they would have soaked it in blood only a few years earlier. Dru laid out naked beneath her on the sheets, the gore on her hands streaking the comforter red, streaking Spike’s hair pink by carding through it as Spike buried her face between those beautiful thighs.

The thought of that alone would have turned her on a few years ago. Now she felt vaguely nauseous and like her cunt was probably going to be bone dry for the rest of her non-existence, short as it might hopefully be. Angel took Dru from her arms and transferred her to the bed when she showed no sign of moving past the doorway, and then said, “Come in, Will.”

It was a hotel room full of vampires. She didn’t need an invite, and hadn’t been waiting for one. But she obeyed anyway, blindly. The voice at the back of her head that would have once made a crack about Sire Says was preoccupied with wondering, between the three of them, how many lives they had wiped out. She had tried to count her own kills on the plane, but had lost track. They hadn’t been worth remembering at the time, and all the souls in the world couldn’t change that now.

“Angelus,” she said, when he turned towards the door, and he turned back. “Don’t leave me here with her.” It would feel too much like a hundred thousand other times they had lived together, bloody and happy, and she couldn’t take the similarity.

He left anyway, and she went to sit outside the door, nestled against it with her arms wrapped around her knees. When he came back a few hours later, holding a brown paper bag, the sun was threatening to rise, and her internal clock was ticking at her, and she was motionless where he had left her. He sighed, and opened the door behind her, and she fell half-into the room as it disappeared from her back, laying there with her eyes closed, pretending to be dead for real. She could hear him going behind her, opening the minifridge. Probably had gotten blood for them. Because he was going to leave again. Angelus was always leaving, and for the first time in her unlife, she could empathize with the moment he had woken up and _felt_ it. She wanted nothing better than to disappear into the streets of LA, dust on the hill beside the Hollywood sign or sleep in an alley with the rats until someone came around and tried to mug her.

Then he was back, peeling her off the floor and laying her on the bed next to Dru, who was awake and naked for some reason. She saw Angel’s eyes flick over her and almost laughed. Dru wasn’t the sort of girl you got over, not entirely. The two of them ought to know that better than anyone. “Dru, put on some clothes,” he said, and because Dru was daddy’s girl, she obeyed, when Spike would have had to wheedle her.

Just like old times. Angelus telling them what to do, and them submitting to his will like little puppies. She stared at the ceiling. Plain white, not even a crack to add interest.

When Dru tried to crawl into Angel’s lap he transferred her to the edge of the bed beside him instead. Spike knew what was coming next. The quiver of Dru’s lip. _Daddy doesn’t want us anymore_ , she had whimpered when they had woken up to find him gone, and then she had gone barking madder than usual. It was still the worst thing on earth to her, not being wanted by her sire, and just as she had that day, she curled up the bed and into Spike’s side. Spike stared at the ceiling.

After a moment Dru blinked, sat up on her elbow, and ran her sharp fingernails dangerously across Spike’s neck. “You’re not mine anymore,” she whispered, and then rolled out of bed and disappeared out the door.

Angel watched her silently. She didn’t react to the loss. It was nothing new, not anymore.

“Why did you come for me?” she asked.

“Stay exactly where you are, Will,” he murmured, and then followed Dru.

She stayed.

**_One month earlier_**.

The morning after the surgery, her head didn’t hurt anymore, and the crypt was cold around her — a temperature that she couldn’t really feel, but understood because of the way the room touched her. She woke to the sound of the door above swinging open, and knew without even consulting the tingle at the back of her neck that it was Buffy. She thought for a moment about escaping through the sewers, but gritted her teeth and decided to tough it out as Buffy descended to the second floor. She had come to her peace with this with Tara last night. Buffy was right, but Buffy couldn’t know that. She couldn’t hold that against her.

But she was almost overwhelmed by the rage she felt when the girl turned around and showed her face. Well, maybe she hadn’t _quite_ come to her peace. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth even harder.

“Spike, you’re growling,” Buffy said quietly.

The noise she hadn’t realized she was making broke off with a guttural snap as she rolled out of bed. “Oh, am I?”

“Can we talk about this?”

The words flowed like lava, or quicksilver; they burned her tongue on the way out. “Why bother talking with me about anything, Slayer? Care about my opinion? Or just want to use me as your little demon-fighting stooge and occasional prick on a stick? I’m just your convenient body, is that it, Summers? Always was. And you decided to string me along with your tight little pussy because you knew I’d be a sucker for it. Maybe you oughta hit me again. Take out some of that stress. After all, what’s old Spike but an object to you? Bit of rough for your bed, bit of tumble for your battlefield. Come on, Slayer, get it over with. Stake me proper, bitch.”

Buffy flinched. “I’m not going to — ”

“No, you’re not. Because I’m a harmless fluffy sodding bunny.” She could feel her eyes boiling into gold. “And _you_ made me that way. Because you’ll go arse up for any vampire, so long’s it can’t bite.”

The green eyes flared, and Spike knew she had touched a nerve. “You’re out of line.”

“Oh, am I, _love_? You going to put me back in?” She grinned, stalking forward. “Going to show me my place beneath you, Slayer? Bring it on. Give us what we’re good for.”

Buffy’s voice was quiet, but her jaw looked like her teeth were about to break from how hard she was clenching them. Her fists were clenched too, so achingly close to giving her what she was asking for. “I’m not going to hit you, Spike.”

“Fine. Give me what _you’re_ good for, then.” She made a crude gesture as she moved closer.

The Slayer dodged out of her hands when Spike reached for her waist, and whirled back to her, face hard and furious, voice held at a deadly pitch. “ _I don’t_ _want to hit you_.”

“Well, _I do_ ,” Spike snarled, and the Slayer went sprawling.

Buffy didn’t get up. She didn’t sweep Spike’s feet out from under her. She just glared up at her from the floor and said, throat hoarse, “Is this what you want?”

“Yes,” Spike hissed, but it was a lie. She wanted the ignorance of waking up yesterday. The cloudy morning of three days ago, opening her eyes here with Buffy lying across her chest. Everything had felt so bloody perfect except the apocalypse and the time bomb in her brain. “Get up, cunt.”

“No,” Buffy told her, and laid there on the floor. Spike could see, past the red haze that was clouding her vision, that it was killing her to stay still. The girl wasn’t built for inaction — staying in a position where Spike could kick her while she was down. The thought to do it flashed before her eyes. The chip wouldn’t stop her. It hadn’t stopped her from clocking the Slayer one just now, after all, which meant that they hadn’t fixed all its glitches. One good blow, and the girl would have no choice but to hit back. Buffy wasn’t Spike, wasn’t the sort to take punches lying down because they would make someone else feel better. She could play out the reverse of the night she hadn’t killed Trina all she liked; she just didn’t have the training to allow herself to be beaten simply because someone else wanted to beat her.

The Spike of a few years ago wouldn’t even have done that, out of a killer’s honor. A Slayer was prey that you had a good fight with, not prey you took when it was easy. The Spike of now roared at her own impotence and threw the bedside table so hard it splintered against the wall.

Buffy flinched, and the air in the room tinged slightly with the sweat of apprehension. Not quite so sour as fear, but just as unbearable, and Spike nearly staggered as it hit her. Wondered if she had smelled that way in the alley as Buffy’s fists had pummeled into her, or if, by that point, she had resigned herself to despair.

“Christ,” she said, and collapsed on the edge of the bed, her face in her hands. “Touch me and that’s it. I’ll break you,” she snarled, when she felt the air near her shoulder move with the passage of Buffy’s hand. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was threatening, but she felt the need to threaten it. To see if Buffy would obey.

The hand withdrew. “I’m sorry,” Buffy told her, quietly. “I couldn’t just think about what I wanted. Or what you wanted.”

Spike’s laugh came out watery. “No, of course not. It’s your sacred bloody duty to cut my balls off or kill me trying. You’ll break every lover you’ve got over your knee, all for the greater good. Why should I expect any fucking better from the girl who can’t love anything but the good fight?”

Buffy blinked, and now her eyes were watering. Spike stood up, turned around, and strode towards the sewer entrance.

She didn’t run, and Buffy didn’t follow.

**_Present day._ **

Angel reappeared sometime after the sun had set. “Have you even moved all day?”

“Told me to stay.” Spike could hear her voice coming out dull and barely-there.

“Since when do you do what I tell you?”

 _Since I got this bloody thing shoved into me and all I do is hurt. Since I don’t want to move. Since I barely want to be anywhere, let alone here_. “Call it a birthday present.”

“It’s not my birthday.”

“Deathday.”

“No.”

“Anniversary.”

“With _who_?”

“Halloween.”

“Spike, shut up.”

Spike kept staring at the ceiling and obeyed. Angel laid a hand on her forehead as if checking for a fever. “I got a soul, not a _pulse_ ,” she grumbled. “And I’m not your sodding childe.”

“Well, your sire isn’t here, so I’ll have to do.”

As much as Dru had been the one to turn her in the most technical sense, Angelus and Darla had been as much sires as she had been. More, sometimes — Dru couldn’t teach her control, couldn’t teach her how to curb the blood desperation. That had been Angelus’ bag. In all but name, he might as well be her sire. His blood would heal her right quick, although not so quick as Dru’s. In fact, it was probably what she owed any shreds of sanity she still possessed to. “Angelus — ”

“Angel.”

“Is this how you felt?”

Angel hummed, and didn’t quite look at her. “If you’re counting the bodies, yes. The screaming stops eventually. It helps to know that the demon had control then.”

“That make you feel better?” she asked, and blinked at the too-white ceiling. “Thinking it wasn’t you? Because I’ve always thought that was a load of bollocks. Still do. Demon’s still here. Angelus and Angel’re the same person even if they’re not Liam. And I’m same as I always was. Rotten at the core.”

“When Dru turned you I didn’t think you’d last a decade,” Angel told her, ignoring the philosophical question she knew he couldn’t really answer with a straight face. “But here you are.”

“Barely. Why didn’t you off yourself?”

“Death was too easy a sentence. I had to repent. What made you do it?”

“Buffy couldn’t trust me without it. Not all the way. Seemed like a load of shit at the time. Seemed funny to me that it mattered at all. I never trusted Dru so far’s I could throw her, and I still loved her like anything. Barmy bint, don’t think she’d mean to do me in, but she could if her mood was just wrong. But the Slayer thinks there’s no love without trust.” She sucked in a deep breath. The next words ached in her stomach as they came out. “Didn’t think anything could hurt so much as knowing we didn’t have either, until now. Anyhow, problem. Solution. And you know me.”

“You’re a fool for love.”

“Was going for ‘persistent’, but yeah, I’ll take that too.”

“She’s still my girl.”

The statement didn’t infuriate Spike like it might have a few days earlier. Instead, there was nothing inside of her but dull acceptance. Buffy didn’t belong to anyone, not even to herself. If Angel didn’t know that yet, it was on him to discover it. “Always will be, I reckon. But I’m hers.”

**_Two months earlier._ **

“Tell me.” Buffy’s voice was breathless, her golden hair hanging in waves around her shoulders, the sharp cuts of her collarbones pressing up as she rocked her body in a wave that jiggled her breasts attractively.

Spike twisted against the handcuffs, not really trying to snap them. “I’m yours. I’m yours, Buffy, damn it. Damn you, please.”

The Slayer’s slim body slammed up into hers, hard enough to break a human woman and toss Spike six inches up the bed, yowling her pleasure. The piece between her legs was modestly-sized and not cock-shaped, and it hurt when she drove it in, just the right kind of hurt to make her like it when she caught a little incidental friction to the clit from Buffy’s body or the base of the strap-on. She couldn’t come like this, and Buffy knew it damn well, but wasn’t touching her.

“Keep going,” said Buffy, looking like a goddess staring down at her, with her red lipstick and her muscles pumping, her body smelling like sweat and arousal.

“Christ, love, I’ll do anything if you’ll just touch me. Touch your Spike. Got me so hot, pet, got me on my back for you. I’d go arse up, I’d suck that bloody thing off if you’ll just give me your fingers. I want you so badly I can hardly breathe.”

Buffy giggled, an expression on her face that was completely incongruous with the brutal pace she was setting with her hips. “You don’t have to breathe.”

“No, but I like to,” Spike growled, and yanked at the cuffs as if trying to get at herself with her own hands. “Damn it all, if you don’t sodding touch me I’m going to break these.”

Buffy gave her a particularly vindictive thrust that drove her almost into the headboard if she hadn’t been holding herself away from it. “If I tell you to stay still you’ll do it.”

The noise she had been about to make came out strangled as she writhed under the assault.

“Tell me,” Buffy panted again.

“’m yours! All yours, Slayer, you do whatever you bloody want to me, you sadistic bloody bitch!”

Gorgeous warrior woman, her muscles all tensed and hard as she moved over Spike, inexorably as the sun and twice as deadly. “ _Tell me_.”

“Oh, fuck — I’ll do anything you want — I love you, Buffy, I love you — ”

**_Present day._ **

“Buffy called me today,” Angel said, and the air was sucked out of the room so quickly Spike didn’t even have time to breathe before the words were out. “She’s tired. They’re having a hard time there.”

“I can’t see her,” she whispered.

“You’re not good enough.” Spike furrowed her brow, but didn’t look up at him. She didn’t need his condemnation with hers. “You’re a monster and now you know you don’t deserve her.”

“Ha.” How was it that whenever Angelus spoke to her like this, it threw her back to those fresh days of being a fledgling, wanting approval and never getting it? Her stomach roiled, and she wished it didn’t hurt so much, knowing he didn’t give a shit. “I _always_ knew I didn’t deserve her. Difference was, I didn’t used to care so much.”

Angel sighed. “I was hoping if I said it like that you’d get angry.”

“I know all your tricks, mate,” she replied, as if she had seen his motivation, hadn’t taken him at his word. As if his word didn’t still sting like a bitch.

“Maybe this is the most I can hope for,” he said. “I didn’t tell her you were here.”

In a contest between promising Buffy he would tell her if Spike turned up and Spike begging him not to make her see the girl, he had chosen Spike. For once. Spike blinked at him. “You lied to her?”

“I — omitted some facts.”

Spike laughed, hollow and short. “You talk to lawyers too much, mate.”

“I — know how it feels,” Angel muttered, and didn’t quite look her in the eye. “I remember, when it first happened. How much lighter you feel without it. How heavy it is inside you.”

She stared at the ceiling. “D’you ever get used to not being enough?”

“For one second, the night Buffy was 17, I forgot I wasn’t,” he replied. “After that, I was more careful. And outside of that, you can try. Seek redemption.”

Spike laughed at that idea. Angelus in the confession box with the priest, saying his Hail Marys like a good little boy. How many Our Fathers for killing thousands without remorse? “Here’s one for you. How many sorry evil bastards does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“Spike...”

“None. They stay in the dark like they deserve.”

Angel sighed again and got up from the bed, heading for the door. “Spike?” She was giggling too hard, too hysterically, to respond to him. It was difficult to hear his parting words over the roaring in her ears. “I’m not going to lie for you again.”

“Wait,” she said, dizzily. “Why did you come?”

“I needed to put blood in the fridge.”

“Not today. To Africa.”

Simply: “You called.”

“Since when do you give a shit, Angelus?”

“As little as I like you, Spike,” he said, sounding grave, “You’re my family. I have a new appreciation for that responsibility, these days.”

**_Three weeks earlier_**.

She was sitting in the airport in Atlanta, still dressed in the dusty leathers she’d crossed the country in on her motorcycle, when she felt the call. It wasn’t quite the punch in the gut of the line being called — the Master had called the Aurelians once or twice, most recently from Sunnydale, and it felt like being hooked through the navel and pulled in his direction. That was the sort of weight blood held over blood. His blood in Darla, hers in Angelus, his in Dru’s, Dru’s in Spike’s was the Master’s in her, a tether that could yank her from anywhere in the world. No, this was a longer leash, and a gentler tug. A summons just for her. She put her hand against her chest and rubbed her sternum absently until the ache died. Angelus was the master of her line now. He could call her in a way she couldn’t ignore.

But he didn’t.

A few hours later, the intercom buzzed and said, _Call for Will Pratt_. There was only one person that could be, but Spike went to the desk and held out her hand for the phone anyway.

“Spike?” Buffy sounded nearly frantic, and for a moment, a pang went through her. The call made sense, all of a sudden. Angelus, doing the bidding of his forever girl and looking for her. And when she hadn’t said _yes sire please sire may I have another sire_ and turned right back around to head to Sunnyhell they had probably gone straight to the witch for a locator spell. “What are you doing in Atlanta?”

She sounded worried. Maybe she was, or maybe she was just missing her handy muscle, handy cock. As soon as Spike thought it she knew it was uncharitable. Buffy was, above everything, a girl who cared for her own. She had been lucky enough to earn that qualification, and now she was stupid enough, crazy enough, to be throwing it away on the possibility of making Buffy hers, too.

 _Love you_ , Spike tried to tell her, but the words got caught in her throat, a swell of anger overtaking it. She hung up the phone and went back to the seats by the gate.

**_Present day._ **

Angel didn’t come back for a few days, but she heard him outside the door every so often, walking by and putting an ear against it to be sure she was still breathing. She always made sure to stop whenever he passed by, so he would know that she knew. She drank the blood that was in the fridge — not human, but she couldn’t say quite _what_ it was — and lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling and thought, _isn’t it funny, they always thought I couldn’t be still_.

And she thought of Buffy. She thought of Buffy constantly, every second she wasn’t thinking about someone innocent choking on their own blood with her fangs in their throat.

She didn’t read. She didn’t watch TV. She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling and remembered Buffy at her bedside, fidgeting with her hands, guilt all over her face. She remembered the anger. Christ, did she remember the anger. The _threat_. God, she’d _hit_ her, and not the way they’d hit each other a thousand times, the way two adversaries reveled in each other’s strength. Instead, the way a man hit a woman who he didn’t respect. The fury had been so choking, so all-consuming, that it had come bursting out of her in demon form, and it was only the all-encompassing love like a noose around her neck that had kept her from tearing the girl limb from limb.

The rage had run so hot and now it was so cold. There wasn’t any anger left inside her, just this bloody inferno all limned in pain. She could understand why it had taken Angel a hundred years to get happy — it was hard to feel anything but grief, and guilt, and horror.

He came in to bring more blood, and didn’t stay to talk. He was feeding her like you would a hamster trapped in a cage, and that was what decided her. Later that week, she stole one of his bloody big shirts, tucked it into her trousers — still ripped and stained from her weeks in them in Africa — and left the hotel to disappear into the night.

While she was walking beside the highway, she felt him call her again, but she didn’t answer. When the sun started to come up, she broke into a car repair shop by the side of the road and rolled under one of the trucks to sleep.

She thought about Buffy.


	3. phlegm.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is late and bad and at this point i'm just completely ignoring season 7 in service of artsy character exploration
> 
> next week will also probably be late. i have some work emergencies unfolding in real time

**_Present day._ **

The Buffy she had fallen in love with before she died was a completely different Buffy than the one that lived now. The girl from before had been fire, too hot to touch without scorching yourself, and if she had been here, now, she would (aside from not caring, because she hadn’t, then) have punched Spike in the nose and dragged her out from under the car when night came and shoved her angrily onto the road towards Sunnydale. If she pretended that that Buffy loved her, then she knew the girl would have spent the nearly-two-months of her absence stopping at almost nothing to find her and bring her home. There was no mountain too high for that girl to climb, and what was more, she did it on spec. Ate impossible things for breakfast because she could.

The one who was now was cooler; an ember that had been submerged but still burned on the inside. She would have been an adult about it when Spike left — although of course she would be furious. She would _say_ she was furious. At losing the help against the First, at being left alone to the mercy of all the girls. At Spike for going away without warning, and even though nothing that had happened had really been Buffy’s fault. She would be incandescent in her fury; she would blaze with righteousness.

And then she would take a breath and give up. Buffy had never lacked for determination, and it had only grown grimmer since her resurrection. But she wasn’t the girl anymore who would climb any mountain just because she could. Death — for Spike, maybe for Buffy too — helped you learn to let go. The Buffy who had had dreams of the future had died under the tower; the Buffy who lived now had _plans_ for the future instead. Finding Spike wouldn’t have been top of the list. It wouldn’t even be top ten, given what else was on the girl’s plate at the time. And it probably never would be again. This Buffy was still almost the most forgiving creature who walked the earth, but she wasn’t one for wasting time on people who had lost her trust.

Lying under the car while the sun beat down directly on either side of her, Spike imagined Buffy sitting in the warm golden light next to her, legs crossed in the dirt, expression peaceful and contemplative.

Staring at the sky.

****

**_A year and a half ago_**.

Buffy was sitting on the ground and staring, and Dawn was gone, and that was a failure, and they all knew it. Buffy was sitting, and staring, and saying nothing, like the world was going by around her, but inside her, the clock had struck midnight.

The next night Buffy would be dead, and no one but Buffy knew it, and Spike woke up from dreaming about herself plunging to the ground to find herself staring at the ceiling of her crypt, shaking. Christ, she should have known it then. Should have known that Buffy had been marching towards the grave from the moment her mother had died, but she’d been too bloody caught up in loving her to see it, too deep in believing she was the strongest girl in the world, and would never break, and had never stopped to think about what _never breaking_ would mean.

Buffy had been dead for a hundred days, today.

She hadn’t gotten to the part of her dream where she’d picked up her own shattered body off the ground and run back up the tower and thrown that bloody bastard off it before he’d had a chance to start Dawn bleeding, and she mourned the loss of it. The loss of the chance to fix it. The loss of Buffy.

The noise that had woken her too early to save the girl was Dawn opening the crypt door, and now she was descending the ladder into the bedroom.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school, Bit?”

“I cut class,” Dawn said, and Spike didn’t bother to pretend to disapprove, even though she should, for Buffy’s sake. “Can I stay here today?”

“Yeah.”

She fell back asleep, and this time she clung to the edge of the tower instead of getting thrown to the ground, and pulled herself back up, and stabbed the prick with his own knife.

When she woke, Dawn was curled up against her back, breathing the congested hiccups of a girl who had recently cried herself to sleep.

A hundred days. The girl was too skinny. Spike took her out for burgers once the moon rose and watched her pick uninterestedly at her food. Willow showed up halfway through dinner in a huff, but when she saw Dawn was with Spike, she just nodded over the girl’s shoulder and turned around to go back the way she’d come.

It had hit her just then, that she was considered an appropriate guardian for Dawn. Because Buffy had sanctioned it, maybe, or because Dawn had accepted her. Because there was no better use for her than killing things and keeping this moody little girl from going fully off the deep end.

She lit up, and when Dawn wrinkled her nose, stubbed it out.

**_Present day._ **

The day after that she spent under a sedan by the side of the road with a FOR SALE sign written in the dust on the windshield, and the day after that she slept in a rest stop bathroom. On the fourth night of walking, she passed the _Welcome to Sunnydale_ sign, and thought about waiting under it until the sun came up. She hadn’t eaten in four days and Angel kept bloody calling her. If the link pushed instead of just pulling she’d have catapulted him halfway to Hawaii by now.

Her first day back in Sunnydale she spent huddled under a porch avoiding the shifting beams of sunlight filtering through the cracks between the boards and wondering why she was bothering. Why she didn’t just let herself burn. Why she was back in Sunnydale at all, when the only thing that drew her here was the Slayer, and she didn’t want to see the Slayer.

She laid under the porch for another day without moving, and when a raccoon crawled by her under the house she ate it and felt barely human.

Not at _all_ human, really, she thought, and laughed. Above her, the sound made the elderly couple sitting in porch chairs jump up and run inside. In Sunnydale, you couldn’t be too careful. She wanted to drain them so badly she nearly ached with it, but even if the soul would have let her, the chip wouldn’t.

What was wrong with her, that she still wanted it so badly? Like an ache in the chest. Didn’t the soul make you a neutered little puppy who vomited at the thought of eating people? God knew she had vomited enough recently to provide proof of concept.

Her stomach growled, and as soon as night fell she scrambled out from under the porch and made her way towards the town. She was careful not to be seen, but it didn’t really matter. No one here would recognize her like this anyway, gaunt from hunger with hair grown out to her natural color at the roots and curling from lack of product, wearing a shirt that smelled of Angelus and trousers that had seen better days.

She couldn’t go back to the crypt, because Clem would be there. Or maybe he wouldn’t, and something nasty would have moved in. She couldn’t patrol the cemeteries, because then she’d be as good as putting herself in the path of the Slayers and their merry pack of Slayerettes. Not Willy’s, because then Buffy would know snap-quick.

Tara, maybe. She was too soft to turn down a wounded thing. But she and Red came package-deal, and that was another rapid path to Buffy. Anya, maybe, but that was a one-way ticket to questions from her dopey lad, which was, again — Buffy. She couldn’t so much as breathe in this bloody town without Buffy knowing about it.

So why was she back?

Angel called her again as the sun rose, and she walked over to a payphone and dialed the number of his stupid hotel, snarled into the phone. “Tell Liam to stop bothering me.”

Hung up with a slam.

**_A hundred-odd years ago_**.

The streets in China were burning and there was Slayer-blood hot in Spike’s belly.

Dru was hanging on her arm and giggling and Angelus was looking at her with something ancient in his eyes that she was too dizzy with power to try to understand. Whatever it was, it was trying to claw at her, tell her something, but at this very moment, she was too high to feel it.

When he was gone and Darla, irritated, had spilled everything in an avalanche of bile, she realized that that had been the soul looking out at her, screaming from behind Angelus’ skull to get out, to stop them. But he had stood by, instead. Let them run in the streets, let the streets run with blood. Let her fuck Dru into every surface that would hold their weight in celebration.

 _Weak, pathetic_ , Darla hissed, venom in her voice that was, Spike was sure, concealing hurt. Darla loved him, as much as she was capable of loving anything, and she missed him. There wasn’t any space in her for love that was true, but she _wanted_ Angelus, consistently and unceasingly. You might call it lust, but lust would be slaked with anyone else. There was something about the man himself that drew Darla, and she was furious that it was beyond the reach of her fingertips.

Dru was just upset that Daddy was gone again.

Spike, for her part, wondered why the hell a soul stopped you from killing. Most of the killers in the world had souls; China had dissolved into fire and fighting, and the participants were mostly souled. Darla had intimated that there had been some kind of test that Angelus had failed, and — she imagined, thinking herself superior — that now that she knew what she could do, having a soul wouldn’t keep _her_ from passing that test.

Snapping necks was so easy. Biting into them was even easier. The hot copper in her mouth, the struggle under her pinioning fangs. Their weak hands clawing at her chest until their heartbeat slowed and the blood ran sluggishly, thick with the body’s attempt to keep it inside.

A soul surely wouldn’t change the rush of elation when someone’s life drained into her.

The Slayer still ran in her veins, a shrieking rush of ecstasy that obliterated everything but the knowledge that she was stronger, more powerful. The superior predator. The thing that went bump in the night.

Thoughts of Angelus stopped bothering her as soon as she had her ravenous tongue buried deep inside Dru.

The font of life that never ran dry.

**_Present day_**.

Life under the porch grew dry quickly, even with nowhere else to go. Spike had never been a great tolerator of boredom, but now even less so, since the thoughts that overtook her when her mind was empty were so powerfully horrifying.

In the end, she went to Joyce’s grave. She had never been able to bear visiting Buffy’s, and she was fairly certain that the headstone had been taken down after she had come back to life, anyway. Was it hidden somewhere, waiting for Buffy to die again? Or had they destroyed it, pretending Buffy might somehow be able to break free of her grand obligation and live a normal life? Maybe have some kids. A husband. Something to go on her grave other than what the world owed her.

Beloved whatever. Joyce’s gravestone was two years old now, and there weren’t any flowers on it. Spike had been the one who had kept Joyce in daisies to push up. Buffy didn’t have the money and the others didn’t think to.

“Your first glimpse of me was as a monster,” she mused to Joyce. “Nearly killed you, I did. But you always treated me right afterwards.”

“I didn’t connect the woman Buffy brought home with the man I hit with the axe until you told me about it,” Joyce replied. “To be fair, Spike, you were much uglier when I met you.”

The fact that Spike didn’t jump halfway out of her skin at that was probably an indication that all was not right in her head. But it had been — Christ, what, three weeks? If that? Not so long, since the soul had been forced back inside her. It was understandable that she might be a bit off her rocker, regardless of how much blood of the line Angel had gotten into her. “You’re dead,” she said anyway, uselessly.

Joyce smiled. It was like Buffy’s smile, until it reached her eyes. “So are you.”

“Not really.”

“Yes, you are,” said Joyce, just the way she always did when she was beginning to work up a head of steam about something. The same way Buffy did. Brow slightly furrowed. Eyes slightly narrowed. Steel will in her expression. “You’re a dead thing, Spike.”

Spike laid back on the grass. “ _Un_ dead.”

“What’s the difference? You know, I’ve always wondered. Buffy did her best, of course, but she never did get around to explaining everything to me.”

“I walk and talk. Dead things rot.”

Joyce smiled again. Sometimes when she did that she looked very far away, but for a dead person, maybe that was appropriate. “You’re rotting too, dear.”

She looked down at herself. Stretched out her fingers, turned her hands over. Looked at the smooth white skin stretched over the bones. Pristine and unscarred as the day she had died. Unmarred by violence or decay. Were they dripping with blood, or was that only in her head? “No, I’m not. Don’t think so, anyway.”

“Inside,” Joyce told her, and she looked down again at her chest, as if the soul might be visible between her breasts, under her sternum.

There was nothing there but Angel’s big bloody shirt hiding her flat chest. She opened the shirt and looked again. The skin there was smooth too, skin that had never seen the sun, before or after death. “I’m rotting inside?”

“Can’t you feel it?”

She laid down on the grass and closed her eyes. When she thought about it, she _could_ feel it. Eating its way into her, through her. Out of her. Idly, she raised her hands to her chest and tried to part the skin there, like she could burn her fingers on the spark sizzling underneath it. “Is that what it is?”

Her fingernails grew wet with blood. Joyce smiled. Again and again and again.

**_Three weeks earlier._ **

When the plane touched down in CAI and Spike rolled soundlessly out of the cargo hold, it was raining. Buffy had her duster — she’d left it at the house before the chip had fritzed itself out, and she’d never gone back to retrieve it — so at least that wasn’t here to be ruined. It had been so bleeding long since she’d stood in the rain and let it soak her.

It did what the cross-country motorcycle ride hadn’t been able to. It washed the scent of Buffy off her skin, off her clothes. The black shirt plastered itself to her skin, her hair began to drip down the back of her neck, and she hunched her shoulders to hide her breasts before she started to walk towards the underground. It was always advantageous to pass as a man anywhere she wasn’t familiar with the lay of the land.

She stole a jacket that was drying over the back of a bench near a bunch of men standing around chatting while they waited for the train. It was brown canvas and it hid her shape as she slipped into the tunnels to find shelter and fell asleep listening to the rain dripping down the walls.

**_Present day_**.

It rained in Sunnydale late that night, and Spike blinked up at the grey early-morning sky, the dirt over Joyce’s grave too old to go muddy; too anchored by grass to sink underneath her as it soaked. It rained in Sunnydale twenty-five days out of the year if they were lucky: at least the place lived up to the _sunny_ part of its name. To hear Buffy tell it, Angelus had once been saved here by a freak snowstorm. In all the many, many days Spike had lived here, it had never once snowed.

She could feel the tingle of _Slayer_ nipping at her senses, but she didn’t move.

When Buffy walked up dressed in a blue shirt and black leather jacket, it seemed almost a foregone conclusion. “I can’t _believe_ you,” she spat, her brow furrowed, mouth pulled into a tight little line. She looked just the way Spike had been imagining her. Angry and radiant. Golden hair plastered to her back in the rain. “You knew how much I needed help here. And you just left. You just left me. You _selfish idiot_. You always have to make everything about you!”

“I know, Buffy. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry isn’t good enough!” Seeing her burned like holy water. Was that holy water falling from the sky? “ _You’re_ not good enough. You _never will be_.”

“I know,” she said, lying on the ground, looking up at her. The hollow space inside her that the soul was overfilling ached like a knife wound. “I know, I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t just apologize! Get up!” Buffy yelled, foot stomping on the wet ground. “Get up and fight me! Hell, kill me? Why not? It’s what you’ve always wanted.”

Spike got up, staggered up, really, and held out her hands, palm facing Buffy. “Hit me.”

“Fight me!”

“Hit me, Buffy, please. As many times as you want. Any way you want.”

An inarticulate angry noise, just like Buffy always made when words failed her and she just wanted to punch something. Buffy should have hit her by now. She blinked, and opened her mouth, and Buffy disappeared between one breath and the next, but the burn of _Slayer_ didn’t.

No one came, so it must be Faith. Girl never had been very aware of her surroundings.

**_A hundred and fifty years earlier_**.

The rain beat against the windows outside and Mina barely heard it. She was looking at Cecily, and Cecily wasn’t looking at her, as if for both of them the world outside of Cecily Addams didn’t exist. There were other ladies in the circle, chatting, but she didn’t hear that any more than the rain. Cecily was playing the piano, and that was all the noise in the world. Draeseke. It wanted for a singing accompaniment, but unless she was much mistaken, the closest thing in the room there was to a baritone was her own voice, and she was, at best, more of a contralto or a tenor on a good day.

She thought about offering anyway. Maybe if they played together Cecily would look at her. But ultimately, when she took in a breath to say something, the wind went out of her sails and she just continued to look at her, fingers stroking the keys. Cecily’s breath went in evenly through her mouth, down the long pale line of her throat, and swelled her breasts as she closed her eyes in thought and continued to play.

She was so beautiful Mina ached to see her. Most humans never felt their soul; but when she looked at Cecily, she could swear it beat within her, like a second heart. Like a grain of light inside her that the stars shone through.

**_Present day_**.

The most sensible person to go to, obviously, would have been Giles. He was an adult, unlike the rest of them, vaguely had his shite together, knew more about souls and vampires than most and was open-minded to learning new things. But while Spike liked the bloke well enough, she didn’t trust him any more than he trusted her, which was to say almost not at all. He probably wouldn’t kill her without provocation, and that was the most she could say for him.

So she didn’t go to Giles. Instead she slept the day in the woods at the edge of the graveyard, mud soaking into Angel’s shirt, her trousers, and ate a fox that made the mistake of thinking she was dead when she laid still for too long. At nightfall, she stood up on wobbly feet and walked past Joyce’s grave, out towards the entrance of the cemetery. When she closed her eyes and let her legs lead she found herself turning west, a route that would take her towards Restfield and towards Revello Drive, depending on where she turned.

Buffy walked beside her, and the light in her burned. She had wondered once how souled love could be anything more than unsouled love, and was finding that it wasn’t _more_ , it was _different_. She had loved Buffy like a train wreck, before. Like a sunset, like an ending. She loved Buffy as an inevitability. The moment before the pain, where all you felt was the high. Dru had begun her, and Buffy would end her, and that was that. It hurt like having your hand in the fire, but it warmed like that, too. Infused her with the power and the glory of loving the thing that would kill her.

The love now was an open wound. Bleeding, but it wouldn’t close. She was leaking love everywhere, out of her pores. Her nostrils, her tits, her bloody eyeballs. And the thing of it was, the damn thing, was that the soul had missed its fucking mark. Because if she had a choice between Buffy diving to the concrete and a hell dimension opening and spilling its guts into theirs, she would hold her there at the top of the tower and beg her to stay.

This love wasn’t the ending of anything, but she feared the ending of it so badly it tasted like ashes when she thought about it. She’d never feared the end before. The end had always snuck up on her and clubbed her over the head and sent her straight to her knees. Now she knew: the end was here, and there was no fucking glory in sight.

Buffy was walking beside her, only it wasn’t really Buffy. Probably it wasn’t. Buffy would be speaking. Buffy might look at her. Not this — not this silent companionship, reminding her of things lost. It was almost worse than the yelling. She should’ve stayed in bloody LA. Haunted the streets of the City of Angels, instead of the angels haunting her.

Instead of making the turn towards Revello or Restfield, she dropped into the sewer entrance and when she got down there, Dru was waiting for her.

“Dru?” she said, and Dru smiled, her absent nowhere smile that meant she was somewhere else inside her head. “What’re you doing here, princess?” Dru shouldn’t be in Sunnydale: Buffy still bloody well hated her for killing that other Slayer, and anyway, as a powerful, soulless vampire, she’d be on the To Slay list regardless. And she might not be the moon that rose and set on Spike’s world anymore, but to see her dust would be to taste death anyway. “Love, we’ve got to get you back to Angelus.”

“Daddy’s not mine anymore,” Dru said, with a queer sad look on her face.

Spike reached for her, but Dru drifted away from her hands like a breeze. “I’m not yours anymore either, remember?”

“You’re always mine. Just as you’re always hers. Just as she’s always Daddy’s. A bright sun that shines into our dust motes and scorches them ashen. If you won’t kill her for me, my prince, we must go home.”

“Home?”

“Home away, my darling. Home away from where is home.”

You had to approach things sideways, with Dru, if you wanted to get something coherent out of her mouth. “And where’s home, princess?”

“Home is where the heart is.”

“Here, then.”

“Am I your heart no longer?”

“You’re here too at the moment, pet.”

“Let’s go away.”

She’d been just thinking about it, about not being there. It was almost tempting, the same way it had always been tempting. If Dru had always offered it, she would never have loved Buffy, but Dru had rejected her, and here they were. “I _am_ yours, all right?” Dru’s to give away, and she had given, and couldn’t take her back. “But you’re not mine anymore, Dru.”

Dru blinked at her with luminous eyes, and began to walk into the darkness.

Spike followed her, because someone had to keep her out of trouble.

**_Two months earlier._ **

As she stalked through the Sunnydale sewers the anger started to fade along with the bruises on her knuckles from hitting Buffy in the face. And when it had faded she sat down on the mostly-dry footpath and leaned against the mostly-dry sewer wall and put her face in her hands. She’d been bloody well out of line and she knew it, even without Buffy having said it. Not the punch; that wasn’t anything special. But the words. _Those_ had been too far. She’d whipped all the skin off Dru’s back more than once, but she’d never, _ever_ hurt her as badly as she was sure she’d wounded Buffy just now.

‘course, Dru had loved the pain. Buffy — no one would like having those things said to them. She’d called her a slut six ways from Sunday and incapable of love and Christ on the cross, she’d done to Buffy what Buffy had done to her. Tried to, anyhow. Tried to make her the piece of ass with no feelings.

Fuck. She was _not_ going to feel guilty about being a little snippy with the girl who’d had the chance to unchip her and not taken it.

She stood up and snarled and paced where she had been sitting. Somewhere back there Buffy was sitting in the crypt — or maybe she’d gone home — and was turning those words over in her head. Over and over until they got inside her, probably, the same way that long-ago comment about how she wasn’t good enough for a second shag had gotten inside her. The girl who couldn’t love. The girl who was only the Slayer. Those were things Buffy had always feared about herself, and Spike had thrown them in her face in a moment of fury.

She felt guilty. Bloody hell. Wasn’t being soulless supposed to get her out of this whole remorse gig?

Maybe it did a bit, because when she thought about turning around and apologizing and begging forgiveness, all she could think of was how she would rather shove pins under her fingernails and then play the Moonlight Sonata _forte_ than go make nice with Buffy and look at her beloved face while warring with the desire to tear her to shreds. She felt guilty — guilty enough to maybe say sorry, eventually — but not guilty enough to want to take it back right away. Because there was something inside her that was glad she’d landed the figurative punch, something ugly and demonic and fucking dark.

She should want to excise that thing. Maybe she did want to.

A few years back and she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. If Dru had ever been _there_ enough to hurt like that, she probably would have reveled in being able to wound her that way, because it would have meant that she cared what Spike thought of her. And she might have felt bad after, might have stroked Dru’s hair and comforted her and built her back up from the rubble, but she would still have been proud to be able to make her into rubble in the first place.

A few years back it wouldn’t have been Buffy, and maybe that was the difference. Maybe it wasn’t anything inside Spike that had changed from who she had been to Dru. Maybe it was the girl and the way she’d fallen into her, and not — maybe Buffy was right, and without the chip she would be the same person she’d always been.

No, she would be _different_. She wasn’t the same as she had been. But maybe she wasn’t different _enough_. Because there was still this _thing_ in her. The sewer tunnel dripped, and Spike saw herself as if through Buffy’s eyes. Crouching in the dark like a rat, jaws foaming with the figurative blood of her kill. Not dangerous, but longing to be.

Now imagine that thing without the choke collar around its throat.

Imagine it free.

**_Present day._ **

Dru ahead of her in the tunnels almost glowed like a lantern, white dress trailing in her wake, hem fluttering out of the muck just the way it always somehow magically had. She should be singing, the way she always did, but instead the music seemed to be coming from far away.

The sewer system under Sunnydale was extensive, perfect for creatures of the night, and over the years Spike had been through every inch of it, which was how she knew that they were drifting like ghosts towards the edges of town. Not west, towards LA, but northeast, in the direction of Death Valley and the rez. “Dru, baby, where are we going?”

“Away,” Dru singsonged. “Didn’t I tell you? You won’t snuff out the sun, so we must go to somewhere where it doesn’t shine.”

“We?”

Dru turned back to her with a wide sweet smile like a little girl. Spike had loved that smile, once. It still ached somewhere deep in her chest when she saw it. “I’ll go away, and you’ll chase me, my lovely. Just like we used to do.”

“You’ve got to go away, yeah, but I’m not going to — ”

Dru’s eyes flashed, the spark that was always there before the clawing moment that she turned on Spike and ripped her to pieces. “The Slayer doesn’t want you. Why would she? When you belong to me.”

“She doesn’t. I don’t.”

“My Spike,” Dru told her, as if in pity. “Always loving girls who don’t love her. Isn’t she pathetic, my darlings?” She looked up at the sewer ceiling as if she could see the stars, and Spike’s jaw clenched against the truth of it. “So scared to let go even when she isn’t wanted.”

Spike looked down. She would have objected on principle before, but it was true. “Dru — ” When she looked back up, she was alone in the tunnel.

Something was wrong in Sunnydale. Something always was, and Buffy was standing against the tide with her little crew of ragtags at her back, bold and strong and utterly, achingly alone at the top of the world.

Spike turned around. She headed towards Revello Drive.


	4. blood.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i was so not going to update this on time, but then 5k words just poured out of me last night for no reason so i suppose here it is.
> 
> i didn't get it to where i wanted to, so there'll be another chapter

**_Present day._ **

A girl Spike didn’t recognize was the one who opened the door at the Summers house. A potential, probably. She squinted for a moment and then crossed her arms, clearly trying to look menacing. Unfortunately, she was maybe sixteen and a little too gangly to pull it off. “What do you want?”

She sucked in a deep breath. She didn’t need it, but it felt grounding. Maybe dizzying. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes. “’m looking for Buffy.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not going to invite you in.”

“That’s smart, in Sunnydale.” Fortunately, Spike wasn’t much for manners, soul or no soul. Hoping her invitation hadn’t been revoked, she stepped forward, shouldering the girl lightly out of the way. There was a fine line between the chip going off and the chip not going off, and she had learned well enough to ride it over the years. Intention wasn’t really what mattered — it would go off if she accidentally ran into someone — and neither was proximity or impact, because she had once caught the boy falling out of a tree over the summer when Buffy had been dead, and it hadn’t gone off then. A little bit of light impact in passing, like wending through a crowd, that she could sometimes do without the fucking thing lighting up her brain.

Mercifully, the invitation held. The girl relaxed as she stepped over the threshold.

Spike raised an eyebrow at her. “You know, _most_ demons don’t require an invitation. I could still be something nasty.”

“Are you?”

“I’m a vampire.”

A squeak, and a scuffling sound as the girl scrambled backwards.

Spike turned back to her. Her eyes were wide and scared. She sighed. “You don’t have a stake, do you?”

The girl just looked at her, expression now confused.

“Right, well, first off, always have a bloody stake in this hell town. Every third wanker has fangs, and better safe than sorry if you ask me. Second, snap something off the bannister if you’re really hard up. Now where’s Buffy?”

The bottom lip quivered. “I’m not telling you.”

Brave. Stupid, but brave. “Buffy can take a single vampire you send her way, pet. You’re weaponless and alone. In this situation, she’d _want_ you to send me toddling off into her pointy embrace.”

“I’m not alone,” the girl said, her eyes going abruptly stony. Then she opened her mouth and screamed, “Faith!”

The house erupted into a flurry of motion. It hadn’t been silent before, of course — the sound of girls upstairs, downstairs, in the kitchen — but now the bodies were converging. “That’ll do, pig.”

“Is that from _Babe_?” the girl asked incredulously, just before a bunch of teenagers, some familiar, some not, tumbled into the foyer, Faith shouldering her way to the front of them, her shoulders squared, back straight, body battle-ready.

“Holy shit, I almost didn’t recognize you,” she said after a moment, dropping her stake hand. “Is _that_ your natural color?”

The girls all relaxed and began to disperse. Or, well, some of them began to disperse. The loners, probably. The ones who had known Spike before stuck around, for the most part, probably curious as to why she was back. “About an inch of it. Where’s Buffy?”

Faith was grinning, which hadn’t been quite the reception Spike had imagined. “Still out on patrol with the other half. They’re coming back soon. Boy, is she going to be mad.”

“The other half?” This was already more girls than had been around when she’d left. There was no way they all fit in this house, and even if they did, living here had to be hellacious.

“Oh, yeah. We had to get overflow housing. They’re in the basement, at Xander’s, Willow and Tara’s, everywhere. I think Buffy would’ve stuck some in your crypt if it had a functioning bathroom.”

“Gotta cut the middleman and go straight to the sewers,” she replied. Several of the girls cringed, but Faith just clapped her on the shoulder. She had a feeling the girl had probably shat worse places than a crypt, and was virtually unable to be scandalized by the mention of it.

“She’ll be coming in from Restfield,” Faith told her, and Spike realized she’d never had a choice. She had always been on her way to see Buffy tonight, no matter which turn she took. “You should probably head her off at the corner unless you want everybody in here to know your business.”

That was a good point. If she’d had all her marbles she probably would’ve thought of it herself. “Would think _you’d_ want to know my business.”

“I’m banking on it being audible from here, but I thought you might like the illusion of privacy.”

“Ta,” she said, and slipped back out into the night.

**_Fifteen months ago._ **

After her first kiss with Buffy — first _real_ one, the spelled ones didn’t count and the one after Glory, while perfect, hadn’t really been for her, but for her bruises — she went home and touched herself until she was sore, not because it had aroused her as much as because it had filled her with energy that didn’t have an obvious other outlet. Buffy had pulled away from her just afterwards, and looked at her with wide eyes, and then fled the alley, and so now all Spike had of her was the taste of chapstick in her mouth and the lingering feeling of a warm body in her arms.

And god, what she would have done if Buffy had stayed.? She didn’t have a bloody clue. Kissed her again? Most likely. Talked to her? If Buffy let her get away with it. What were you supposed to do when the girl you loved kissed you to chase the taste of the truth out of her mouth?

She was rubbing her clit to the rhythm of Buffy’s lips on hers, to the beat of her last song, and it didn’t quite feel _right_. Not _wrong_ , but — not right. She pictured going down on her knees for her in the alley. No, that wasn’t good enough. Pictured pushing her up against the wall. Still not quite there. Christ, she loved the girl. She loved her. She erased the memory of the alley and took them back to her bedroom in the lower level of the crypt. Still not right.

The front step of Revello Drive. The fading summer stars through the filtering trees. California air seventy degrees in the shade. Buffy wrapped in a green sundress with a golden cross sparkling between her breasts. _This is where it should have been_ , she thought, and slipped her fingers out of her jeans. No death, no scent of piss, no desperate tongue prying its way into her mouth because Buffy didn’t want to think about what her friends now knew.

Only when she thought about it, she knew damn well that without the grave dirt under her nails, Buffy would never have thought about kissing her tonight, alley or no alley.

The idyllic little scene, the scene Angelus had probably had a thousand times, fell apart. If she and Buffy were going to come together, it wasn’t going to be pretty and it wasn’t going to look like a fifties fantasy. Buffy had clawed her way inside Spike’s breastbone, and the skin had sealed itself up behind her, trapping her there. A beating heart where nothing was supposed to be. A bird in her ribcage, fluttering against the bars.

She could feel the silk of Buffy’s hair under her hands.

The scrape of her teeth against the inside of her sternum.

**_Present day._ **

She felt the group of them approaching before she saw them. Her eyes picked Buffy’s silhouette out of the pack — the oldest of the group and still the shortest — and her heart jumped into her throat. “Fuck,” she muttered to herself. “Fuck, _fuck_. Bloody fuck.”

For the first time since encountering her first Slayer, she was overcome with the powerful urge to run away. Keeping her feet planted took more effort than she was willing to admit.

It’s just a girl. It’s just a girl. _You love her, you love her, you love her_.

She saw when Buffy saw her, because the figure stopped. Then the flanking figures stopped too, one by one, as they noticed their leader had frozen. Stakes were drawn. Buffy didn’t raise a hand to stop them. Then one of them was running forward — Dawn, judging by the tall, lanky shape of it. “Spike!”

Her body bent its knees before the impact on instinct, keeping her upright when the figure hit her at speed, but there wasn’t a single thought in Spike’s head that wasn’t focused on the girl up the street, still frozen enough though the others had started to move. “Missed you too, Bit.”

Dawn drew back from the hug and then punched her in the chest. She forgot that she usually pretended to be hurt when Dawn hit her to boost the girl’s self-confidence, and the thin face frowned at her when she didn’t flinch. “You are such an _idiot_!”

The other teenagers were drawing closer. “I know.”

“Buffy is going to kill you and I’m only going to stop her if she gets _really_ close,” Dawn admonished. “Because it was really shitty of you to leave and I’m mad at you too. Also, your coat is mine now.”

The girls were on them now, some of them greeting her with waves but most of them staring suspiciously and then moving past. “That thing wouldn’t fit you even if you packed on another hundred pounds,” she said absently, her eyes still on Buffy. “I’ll catch up with you later, all right? I’ve gotta — ”

“Buffy.”

“Buffy,” Spike agreed.

“Good luck,” Dawn told her, sounding dubious, and brushed past her and was gone, and then it was like all the air was sucked out of the street. And yeah, that wouldn’t actually matter, but — but _Christ_. She walked forward past the few remaining girls, and turned back when she was halfway up the street to make sure that they had all actually headed for the house. She wanted to jog the rest of the way to the girl, but Buffy was still standing there stock-still, and she wanted to run away just as badly.

She forced herself to walk forward, one foot after another.

**_Three years earlier._ **

One foot after another. All the way to the cliff edge. It was early morning, and the water was blue down below, but it looked black, and the sun would be here in two hours, but it didn’t matter, because this would be a beautiful place to die, because Dru didn’t want her anymore.

“If you close your eyes and wish real hard — ” Buffy the Vampire Slayer whispered in the back of her mind.

She’d tried every trick in the sodding book. Torture. Presents. Flirtation. Begging. Tears. And none of them had worked. Dru had moved on already. Back to mostly blokes for her, Spike supposed. Back to big tall men who looked like Daddy and not the woman who’d given up bloody everything for her. Dru was gone and all there was was the sun.

Angelus’ arm blocking the girl from staking her.

The sun over the Argentinian coast and she was bloody well drunk and waiting for the sun. Because when it came right down to it she was a coward, and she wanted not to exist anymore — wanted Dru to have the courtesy to fucking dust her if she was going to leave her without an unlife — but she didn’t want to catch on fire while sober. It was an unpleasant way to go, but beheading yourself or staking yourself weren’t particularly certain. You could never be sure that your fingers wouldn’t go nerveless just that moment too soon to sever the spinal cord, to breach the wall of the heart.

 _I violently dislike you_.

Back when she’d still reckoned she’d get Dru back, and every little barb from the Slayer was a balm on her aching heart. The people who were supposed to hate her hated her and someday the people who were supposed to love her would love her again.

Angelus, looking at her with undisguised pity and disgust.

She thought of their angry eyes together, his and the Slayer’s, and she dropped over the cliff edge and into the water at the bottom. Broke a rib on the rocks, but made her way to a cave at the foot. Existing out of spite. Sheltering from the sun because if something was bloody well going to kill her it was going to be the Slayer.

Sunnydale, the last place they’d been happy. Cute little nowhere town with more than its fair share of monsters, and more than its fair share of monster hunters.

She ought to have known then that it was always going to be Buffy.

**_Present day._ **

“Spike,” Buffy said flatly when the two of them were separated by only ten feet.

Every response she could think of was either too casual, or not casual enough, or just plain wrong. Finally, she replied, “’lo, love.”

Buffy’s mouth tightened. Still wrong, apparently. She should have known right away that the thing she’d seen in the graveyard wasn’t Buffy. Yelling would be too easy to fix. Too good. Buffy wasn’t burning with anger anymore. She was just existing in it. If Spike had had any thought of telling her about the soul, it fled the second she saw the tired look in those beautiful eyes. “You’re back.”

“I’ve got a decent pair of fighting hands if you need them.”

“I’ve needed them for _two months_ ,” Buffy told her, acid in her voice for a moment before it drained away again and she was calm. “Why are you here?”

She’d expected, maybe, to be asked why she’d left. Why she was back, she had assumed, was obvious. For the girl. It was always for the girl. The soul was for the girl and her hands were for the girl and when she dusted, it would be for this girl. “Because I — ”

“Because you love me,” Buffy said quietly. A man had once written that sadness elevated beauty. Spike had never agreed more truly than at this moment. Buffy looked like a woman, the way she always had since her mother had gotten sick. Not a little girl, not Angelus’ teenage dream queen. And at this moment, she couldn’t think of a more beautiful woman that she’d ever seen. Buffy could be a thousand years old from the look in her eyes, and her hair was back in a ponytail, and she was so strong, Atlas holding up the world. “Whatever. You loved me before and you still left. Tell me the truth.”

“Imagine the thing that eats the world,” Spike whispered, because it was all her brain could come up with to explain it. “In you, everything sank.”

As unlettered as ever, Buffy squinted and cocked her head slightly. “What?”

“It’s a poem. About despair. Not a perfect metaphor. Just — what I mean is I could never have stayed away in the first place. Leaving could never be anything but temporary. You’ve got a gravitational pull, Buffy.”

“So you have no choice.” Voice iron hard. Eyes jade chips set in a marble face. “Is that what you’re saying? Really flattering, Spike. I can do this without you.”

She was bloody good at pretty words. Had loads of them to explain the great winged monsters wheeling through her head. But she couldn’t understand what exactly Buffy wanted her to say, what words would convey her point. “If I had a choice,” she said, truthfully, “I would choose you. That’s how it’s always been for me, since I’ve loved you.”

“And yet, you chose wherever you’ve been for the last two months. Girls have died, Spike. Other people too.”

“I was still choosing you then.”

“I don’t want poems or riddles or whatever,” Buffy told her, looking frustrated. “And I don’t know what’s wrong with you that you can’t see that.”

“’m sorry, love — ”

“Don’t call me that.”

Spike flinched back as if she’d been struck. She hadn’t heard those words in this context since before Buffy had tried to break it off with her the first time. Looking at her with fathomless eyes, Buffy turned on her heel and walked down the street towards the house, lit from within, like a lighthouse at sea.

**_One year earlier._ **

“I’ve been telling you, love — ”

“Don’t call me that,” Buffy told her, naked and glorious and splayed out on Spike’s bed recovering from the aftershocks of what had to be at least six orgasms, although Spike had lost count sometime around the time Buffy had nearly scalped her by hand while she came shrieking so loudly that only Spike’s reputation would keep the demons from the door. “I’m not your love and I’m not your pet and I’m not your baby or your sweetheart or whatever.”

It hurt every bloody time she said that, but Spike kept slipping. Partly because she thought of that word in conjunction with Buffy so often that the two were mentally inseparable, and partly because some day, Buffy would forget to snap at her, and that was when she would know there was a crack in the wall. “What, you want me to call you Slayer while we’re shagging? You’re like one of those army blokes who gets off on being called by his rank.”

“I’m serious, Spike. It — just don’t.”

For one bloody second there, she’d been about to share a feeling about whatever this thing between them was. She shared her feelings about every other bloody thing — Dawn, her life, wanting to be dead again — but mentioning the fact that they fucked like bunnies every chance Buffy got to slip away meant having to acknowledge it, and _that_ the girl would not do. Spike could fill in the blanks well enough, though. The only reason anyone ever complained about endearments was because they thought you were being too familiar.

She slipped back into bed and Buffy rolled away from her. “Let me let you in on a secret, kitten.” Buffy hadn’t specifically forbidden that one, but her eyes did go stormy at the way it dropped into the sentence. “There’s no such thing anymore as _too familiar_ for you and me. That disappeared the bloody moment you spread those sweet thighs for me and begged me to fuck you. Now, if I called you _whore_ in the heat of it and you said _don’t call me that_ , I’d listen right quick and you’d never hear the word from my lips again. But you came to _my_ bloody bed, in _my_ bloody crypt to let _me_ lick you back up into the stratosphere. And in these walls, princess, you don’t get to tell me what I can sodding well say when I’m _not_ screwing you into the mattress. If you can’t stand to hear me call you love you can go right ahead and find somebody else to suck on your clit.”

As soon as she’d said it she regretted it. Not because it had been hurtful, but because if Buffy took her up on it she’d want to tear herself to shreds. Before it had come out of her mouth she had been so sure, so bloody sure, that Buffy was addicted to the flex of _her_ tongue in that tight cunt, of the feel of _her_ thumb massaging over the slick little nub right at her apex. Now she was back in the real world, where Buffy could have anybody she bloody wanted, and Spike had just told her to fuck off and want them. “Maybe I _will_ ,” Buffy said angrily, after a few moments of stunned silence, and started to pick up her clothes off the floor.

God, she had to do something. Couldn’t let the girl slip free now, because if she did maybe she wouldn’t come back. Maybe she would, but the maybe was too much for her to tolerate.

Buffy looked for her shirt. Frantic but trying not to show it, Spike snatched it up off the floor in front of her. “Looking for this?”

“Give it to me.”

“Come get it.”

Then Buffy had her back against the wall and they were kissing so hard Buffy’s teeth drew blood.

**_Present day._ **

Clem had moved in properly to the crypt while she’d been gone, and she didn’t have the heart to roust him, but she asked to sleep on the couch that had once been hers and he tripped over himself to agree. He offered her beer and she drank it like water. He offered her food and she flashed fangs at him and tried to find it funny when he flinched, but instead she just felt bloody horrible for having done it. “Place’s yours,” she told him, at 6 a.m. when the sun was rising and she had a six-pack and a half sitting in her belly. “Won’t be around here long anyway.”

“You’re leaving?” he asked. “I figured you’d stay and fight. All my family’s left already, but I was waiting to see if you’d come back. I didn’t want you to come back to somebody living here, not when you asked me to housesit and let me stay here and all.”

“Probably wise of ‘em to leave in a general sense, but a bit early. There’s some slack yet left in the line.”

“I knew you’d know,” he said, sounding grateful. “What with dating the Slayer and all. How is she, anyway? She hasn’t come around here since you left. Her sister still stops by occasionally.”

“That’s not how I — the air tastes different the day of a big to-do. Slayer and me are…” Who knew what they were? This wasn’t even that little half-relationship from after her resurrection, where she could be counted on to drop by occasionally for sex. It wasn’t even the half-allyship they had had before that, where Buffy asked for things and Spike delivered. They weren’t enemies, they weren’t friends, and they weren’t lovers. They didn’t even have a transactional relationship to put your thumb on. “… Slayer and me aren’t anything anymore.”

“That’s too bad,” Clem said, sounding sad for her. “I liked her.”

“Me too, mate. Me too. Got a soul for her and everything. Bloody boneheaded thing to do.”

“You have a soul?” he asked, seeming interested.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

**_Five years earlier._ **

Angelus was a bloody idiot if he thought she couldn’t see through his stupid charade. Or maybe he thought _she_ was a bloody idiot. Offering her the boy as if Himself would ever have brought her a gift like that.

Oh, the old bastard was plenty generous when he wanted to be. He brought Dru and Darla gifts all the time — pretty stolen baubles, clothing he wanted to see them in. But he’d never really counted Spike amongst _his women_ , not after he’d reached for her waist one night when she’d been new and she had responded by going still and mute. If she had gone willingly into his arms he would have accepted that, she thought. If she’d bitten him, she suspected, or roared her fury, he would have taken pleasure in beating her into a shape he could fuck. If she’d shied away or tried to run he would have chased her — maybe tried to make her like it, to make the fear seem irrational. But there wasn’t any fun in brutalizing a victim who was neither scared nor pleased nor furious. You couldn’t evoke a lasting response in a mind that was elsewhere when you were inflicting the impression. Since then he’d treated her more like an irritating little brother, which meant that they roughhoused frequently and he occasionally brought her something at Christmas. Usually a notebook, bound in some creamy leather, the binding on the spine in some nice contrasting color. Lovely notebooks, really.

Never a human, though. Certainly never one who mouthed off to him and was then allowed to live. The real Angelus would’ve snapped Harris’ neck faster than he could say _I told you so_.

She knew it wasn’t him the bloody moment he threw an arm around her and hugged her, because he’d never once done that since the day she’d gone dead on him, either. It wasn’t courtesy, to be sure, Angelus never would have offered her that. Just disinterest. She wasn’t _fun_ to have in his arms, in any of the ways women usually were fun for him, so he never bothered. Even when they slept in the same bed, even when they shared Dru, he had mostly ignored her. She was good for card games and fights and sometimes he had a jolly time helping her pass as a bloke, but they weren’t the sort of friends who hugged, and never had been.

They weren’t friends at all anymore.

Besides all that, even if he _had_ been any good at playing Himself, the soul clung to him like a bloody fog. He smelled wrong, and it wasn’t just that poncey hair gel. Like there was something aging inside him, something mortal. Not quite rot or sickness, but a certain something _off_. Like a book with yellowed pages or a chain that had rusted. The funny thing of it was, if she had to put a word on it, she’d have to go with _impure_. Like the difference between water in a glass that was ice clear and cold and water running in a brook, ice clear and cold unless you leaned close enough and saw it kissing the algae on the rocks, lapping delicately at the shore-dirt that bordered it.

A wound that seemed red and clean today, but which was going to fester tomorrow.

**_Present day._ **

When she fell asleep, she dreamt of Angelus in the cave with her fangs in his throat. The taste of his blood, so different from what it had been when she’d known him first. Vampire blood, because it was borrowed, always reflected the diet of the vampire, and when she’d first had his blood he had tasted strong. Bursting at the seams with vitality, with humanity. A vampire at the top of his game. By the time they were in that cave in Africa, he tasted — still like a master, still like family, but — duller. No sparkle. Like soda gone flat. There was power in that blood, but there was an overcurrent of farm animal. A bit like biting into a hundred-dollar strip steak and finding out it had come off a hyena.

A thousand victims whose blood she’d drained ringed the two of them and stared.

She woke to Buffy sitting on the coffee table and looking at her, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. “Morning, Slayer,” she said, after a moment. “Do you bleed?”

Buffy squinted, confused. “I still need your hands,” she said. “Are they still on offer?”

“Who’s asking?”

“Is there something wrong with you?”

“I smell funny.”

A heavy sigh. “Yeah, no kidding. Are those the pants you were wearing the night you left?”

“You can get a lot of wear out of a good pair of jeans.”

“Not two months of it,” Buffy told her, but she didn’t look like her heart was in the argument. “ _I’m_ asking, Spike.”

“Who are you?” Buffy flinched, and Spike wanted to reach out for her so badly her hands twitched. “Pinch me to be sure I’m not dreaming, I mean.”

Buffy apparently couldn’t resist the invitation. The pinch hurt in the way only a Slayer’s could. In fact, it would probably bruise.

“Always for you,” Spike answered.

Buffy wrinkled her nose, her eyes snapping with anger that she was clearly suppressing. “You’re being really weird this morning.”

“Where d’you need my hands, Buffy?” Buffy flinched again, like she was remembering all the other times Spike had said that to her. She thought about taking it back as soon as she heard how it sounded, but Buffy would notice that, would figure out something was wrong. Buffy’s jaw was squared, eyes flinty. She was on the edge of _something wrong_ already.

“Don’t do that. Just — don’t.” She looked away, and then back. Buffy was a brave girl, that way. When she told you something you didn’t want to hear, she looked you in the eyes. “I don’t need anything from you if we can’t trust you. I’m not going to turn you away because of my pride. But I’m also not going to take you out of desperation. So you tell me, right now, that you’re going to be reliable, and make me believe it. Or you can go right back to wherever the hell you’ve been for the last two months and stay there.”

It was obvious the girl had been mulling that over in her head in the hours since she’d parted ways, because up until the last sentence, it sounded canned. That sentence, though, that one crackled with anger. Spike looked her dead in the eye. “I’m here until the end.”

After a long pause, Buffy nodded.


	5. spirit.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i know i'm late. really who's surprised. no one's reading this anyway. while i was trying to figure out how to end this i was thinking about what the parts of this series are for. pt 1 is the foundation, pt 2 was to turn the relationship into something more equitable. pt 3 was because i'm hilarious. this part is about sticking your fingers in the holes (pause for laughter) in the relationship and pulling. spike has changed a lot over the course of the fourth through seventh seasons, obviously, but buffy has both changed and has already adjusted her perspective on good and evil to accomodate loving spike. spike's perspective on good and evil needed to change too to bring it full circle.
> 
> also, i didn't want to actually write out season 7 so i'm ending it here, on a terrible metaphor

**_Present day._ **

Buffy trusted her the exact amount that was necessary, no more and no less. If she gave an order, Spike would follow it. If she handed her a pack of girls, Spike would run them or train them or show them anything they needed to know. If you pointed her at something she would kill it. Spike could be trusted to guard the Scoobies, or to play nice with the new folks. But she wasn’t part of the inner circle, insofar as she ever had been part of it.

She didn’t get invited to anything anymore. Just like the bad old days that way. She dropped in anyway. Buffy never asked for advice or tried to pour out her heart or even made much small talk, and she didn’t offer it. They were civil but not friendly. She certainly wasn’t invited to Buffy’s confidence, or her bedroom.

It killed her.

Not the bedroom, that she could do without. But if she’d thought loving the girl back before Glory was bad, back when there wasn’t any chance in hell and Buffy was only going to treat her with disdain — if she’d thought that loving the girl when she’d crawled out of the grave was bad, back when the chance teased her but always stayed just out of her grasp —

Christ, this was so much worse. Having tasted Buffy’s love, and having lost it. To see her every bloody day almost and to know that when she woke up in the morning her hair was a rat’s nest, that when she cried her nose got blotchy and she wanted ice cream and to be held, that she loved ice dancing and shoes and pretended to like low-fat yogurt. The sort of little knowings you collected about your lover, the sort of things Spike had hoarded in the back of her mind over the course of their acquaintance like a mound of dragons’ treasure.

She wondered if Buffy had collected the same sorts of things about her. Only she couldn’t imagine Buffy doing that, partly because Spike’s habits weren’t nearly as charming and partly because Buffy wasn’t always terribly observant. It wasn’t that Buffy hadn’t loved her — she believed her when she said she had, she’d felt it when they’d shagged, when they’d laid in bed together and Buffy had stroked over the planes of her stomach soothingly. But Buffy wasn’t a romantic. Maybe she had been once, before Angel had shaken his bloody soul loose, but she hadn’t been in all the years Spike had known her.

They hadn’t quite been alone together since she’d gotten back.

**_Seven months ago_**.

“Not that I don’t love watching your arse when you kick things, but let me take you out properly for once. Go dancing. Make a night of it.”

Buffy looked at her with a blank expression for a moment, and then broke into a smile so bright it nearly hurt to look at. Spike thought she was doing quite well on her second chance, which was still fresh, but maybe she ought to have suggested dancing sooner, because Buffy looked genuinely delighted. Well, from what she remembered of Riley Finn, she doubted he’d been much for dancing, and there wasn’t a chance in hell Angelus had taken her, because although he could dance credibly enough in a ballroom, he wasn’t the sort of person who appreciated clubs and therefore probably hadn’t learned how to move in one.

When Spike met her on the steps outside Revello Drive, she was wearing a slinky little pink thing that fell off her shoulders and draped temptingly over her breasts, and her hair was bouncing around her shoulders. She’d put on makeup — not something she often bothered with anymore — and was wearing strappy little heels that made Spike want to pick her up and carry her to spare her ankles. But Buffy had walked in them like they were her own two feet, and danced in them all night like they were hardly there. “We should do that more often,” she said as they left, the glint of her smile white in the moonlight. “You’re a good dancer.”

Spike kissed her against a graveyard fence and felt like a god with her warm in her arms, with her pink lipstick all over her face. When Buffy pulled off her heels and took off through the headstones, she followed without chasing, keeping pace just exactly three meters back.

Keeping the demon on the inside.

**_Present day._ **

She tried to keep the soul on the inside. She wasn’t quite sure why, except that the thought of Buffy knowing was unbearable somehow. When Dawn had asked where she’d been, she truthfully said Africa, and when Dawn asked why she shrugged and said “Off to see a man about a dog.”

It still drove her crazy. Sometimes so crazy she couldn’t sleep, sometimes so crazy she talked to dead people and wasn’t sure if it was the First or if it was her own sodding imagination. It ate away at her every bloody day. Some days more than others. One day she dreamed of a little girl Dru had played with for a week, of her pleas and the way she’d ignored them. Not even laughed at them, not even denied them, not even killed her. Just ignored the girl, like she wasn’t even there as she’d been dying. That evening at the Scooby meeting she chain-smoked and fidgeted and Dawn came up to her and she half jumped-out of her undead skin because for a moment her eyes looked just like that dead girl’s.

“Whoa,” said Dawn, holding up her hands. “Spaz much?”

“Sorry, pet.”

“You look tired,” Dawn told her. She was the only one of them who didn’t seem to feel odd about talking with her, outside of Faith, who probably knew it was odd but didn’t care. Giles watched her like a hawk, exactly like he always had, and Xander did the same with sharp eyes that made her think Buffy had told him something. Willow looked like she wanted to say something sometimes, but never did, and Tara had never talked much in public anyway, although she did keep staring at Spike. Anya didn’t come to the meetings anymore much.

“Haven’t been sleeping well.” It was true. The dreams woke her up most nights. She’d always been a deep sleeper, an efficient sleeper — not anymore. Not since the soul. Now the fucking thing beat her into consciousness every time she managed to drift off.

“Is everything okay?” And Dawn looked genuinely concerned, and not for the first time Spike wanted to cry, because she absolutely didn’t deserve Dawn’s bloody concern.

“You were just a little morsel when I met you, y’know,” she said, forcing a grin and not daring to ruffle Dawn’s hair because it turned out teenage girls were picky about that sort of thing. “This high.” She indicated a point near Dawn’s waist. “D’you remember what you said?”

Well, nothing, really, because she hadn’t really been there. But Spike remembered it and Dawn remembered it and that made it real enough. Dawn cracked a smile. “’Buffy says I’m not supposed to talk to you’.”

“Right little rebel you were.”

“I can’t believe she left Mom alone with you.”

Spike looked across the room at Buffy, who was very deliberately not looking at her. “Slayers have good instincts.”

**_Four months ago._ **

“You should bite me again,” Buffy told her matter-of-factly, like she wasn’t sitting in Spike’s lap with her legs spread wide to accommodate the strap that had just slipped sweet up inside her. “I liked it, you know.”

“I know you did, love,” Spike replied, because she did. You could taste lust in the blood, and she had heard Buffy’s noises while it had been happening, anyway. She was a bit puzzled with why they were having this conversation now, though, because she’d just worked Buffy up into a proper lather, so wet and open that she’d sunk in without a hitch. And she’d been panting like a bitch in heat until they’d taken a moment to let her adjust to the length inside her and now she was having a conversation like there weren’t 6 inches of silicon buried in her. “Wait, d’you mean you want me to bite you _now_?”

“Uh huh.” A bright smile. Spike shoved her down in the pillows to ride her hard, until she was gasping again and then crying out and then nearly screaming. And she felt so fragile like this, underneath her, so tiny you could almost forget she was the Slayer. Her neatly manicured nails dragged down Spike’s back and left red lines in their wake.

“Getting greedy, hmm, pet?” she asked, purring it into Buffy’s ear. “Want my fangs in you along with my prick?”

Buffy nodded furiously. Given how her body was jolting with the thrusts, her breasts bouncing, the motion almost made her look frantic. And maybe she was. Her eyes were wide and wild, and then they screwed shut as her head fell back, baring the pale golden line of her throat as Spike scrubbed at her clit with her thumb. “Yes,” she sighed. “Yes, yes, yes — ”

“No,” Spike whispered against the side of Buffy’s face, just as the girl’s body drew like a bow underneath her and she cried her release.

“No?” Buffy said, after she’d gotten her breath back. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Spike drew out of her slowly, carefully, and then laid down beside her without undoing the harness, so the thing stuck up from her hips, glistening with Buffy’s slick. “It means that I’m not taking blood from you every other day. Hell, given what I know about your eating habits, not more than once a month.”

To her surprise, Buffy paused for a moment and then beamed. It was an odd reaction to being denied, particularly from the girl who got her way come hell or high water. “What’s wrong with my eating habits?”

“You don’t eat nearly enough meat, to start with.”

Buffy giggled and then rolled towards her to claim her kiss without Spike even reminding her it was due. She stayed draped over Spike’s left side, breasts pressed warmly up against her shoulder, snuggling up against her and gripping the strap-on as if it were live flesh. Spike was surprised by how much the sight of it turned her on. “You really love me, huh?”

Spike looked at her like she’d grown a second head. “Of course I bloody love you, you daft cow. I’ve done practically every damn thing to show you short of shouting it from the rooftops, and that’s mostly because it’s a pain in the arse climbing up there.”

“No, I mean — ” Buffy paused, and then propped her chin up against Spike’s shoulder. She was still smiling, and she looked radiant. “It’s just that I knew. I knew you’d say no.”

**_Present day._ **

“Hey. You were screaming,” Clem said, when he came into focus above her. She started into full wakefulness and nearly clambered over the back of the couch, her threat response still pumped so high that she ran from him instead of tearing his head off his shoulders. “Whoa, hey.”

“Christ,” she said, nearly wheezing it. She didn’t need to breathe, but she was gasping for air. Her heart didn’t beat, but her chest was squeezing in on itself like it was trying to form a black hole in the center of her chest. “What the fuck, Clem, get the hell away from me — ”

He was looking at her with a sort of concern that you reserved for crazy people, and maybe she was crazy. No, she was definitely crazy. “Are you — ”

“Do I fucking _look_ all right?” She wanted to retch again for the first time since the cave. She’d been dreaming of Paris, painting the town red with Dru in 1924. A young couple dressed in finery dead in an alley, throats torn out. A girl in a short dress dead on the dance floor, neck snapped. A bloke with a kind smile dead in their bed, his cold body jolting while she took Dru on the sheets just next to him. A dinner party they’d massacred. Two little girls upstairs who’d slept through it but hadn’t escaped, because of course they bloody hadn’t. “What’s happening,” she asked, not really wanting an answer. Her head was spinning. “Everything’s so — ”

Clem moved a little closer, just a sway really, and it made the folds of his skin shift, made his clothes drag against the floor, and the noise was deafening somehow and she nearly reached out to throttle him before she looked at her hands with horror and scrambled for the door.

It was daylight, and when she opened the door and it started to burn she dashed for the sewer entrance instead, to cower in the dark.

She missed the meeting that night.

**_Six months ago._ **

“We’re gonna miss the meeting,” Buffy hissed. “And then they’re going to come in here looking for us and — ”

“ _I’m_ going to miss your cunt if you don’t let me finish this,” Spike told her, raising her face, flicking her tongue against her teeth to watch Buffy’s pupils dilate. “C’mon, love. I’ll make it so good.”

“You say that every time.” But her tape-wrapped hands went back to Spike’s hair.

“And every time I make it so good for you,” she replied, and bent her head back to her task, stroking her tongue delicately through Buffy’s center and then wriggling it a little deeper into her, using her upper lip to rub petal-soft over her clit while the tip of her tongue traced a circle around the delicate rim of her hole.

“Ooh,” Buffy said when Spike’s teeth sparked for just one rough second against her clit. “More of — no, no — ”

Spike had covered her teeth with her lip again and was back to teasing her. Buffy thrashed, annoyed or frustrated or possibly both, and Spike only didn’t catch her with her teeth again because her hands were on those pretty hips, holding them still as Buffy’s body spasmed with desire.

**_Present day._ **

Xander looked casual when he came in late, in that way that wasn’t casual at all, hands stuffed into his pockets, shoulders hunched, leaning against the bottom of the staircase. He was chewing on his lower lip. “Hey, Buffy, is Angel in town?”

“No,” said Buffy without looking up. Faith looked over at him with her gaze sharp and searching, and Willow’s eyes flicked upwards.

The boy grimaced and shifted on his feet. “Okay, because Angel’s in town.”

Buffy looked up with her brow furrowed. “What?” She very much looked like she didn’t want to deal with that idea. Spike didn’t much want to deal with it either, but it was plausible.

“Yeah, I was over at — a bar — ” Spike knew exactly the one he was talking about, and why he wasn’t naming it. “ — and I overheard some demons talking about ‘the souled vampire,’ and how many of those do we know?”

Spike twitched. If Angel _wasn’t_ in town she was going to wring Clem’s flappy neck.

“Why doesn’t he ever just _call_?” Buffy muttered.

“Met Alexander Graham Bell once and they didn’t get on,” Spike told her. No one laughed, some of them because they refused to laugh at her jokes on principle and some because it just wasn’t that funny. She sighed and wondered if the soul had killed her sense of humor, too. She’d at least used to be able to get a giggle out of Willow. “I’ll go sniff around for the old sod. I know his haunts.”

Instead of going to any of his haunts, she picked up a payphone and kneed it. A little pile of quarters fell out, and she shoved one into the slot and dialed Angel’s big bloody hotel. “Angel Investigations!” said the voice on the other end of the line on the second ring.

“I want to talk to Angel.”

A pause. The voice was more suspicious now. “Who is this?”

“Tom Cruise. Put him on.”

Suspicion had turned to ice. “He’s not here.”

“Is he in Sunnydale?”

A very, very long pause. “Not unless he teleported there in the thirty minutes since I saw him.”

“Right you are,” Spike said, and hung up to go in search of Clem.

**_Five years ago._ **

Angelus was a right bastard without the soul, but you just couldn’t respect the man with it. Angelus had a lot of good qualities, when it came right down to it. He was whip-smart, a vicious fighter, creative and independent and ruthless. A born leader. According to Dru, one hell of a lover.

According to Dru’s shrieks, anyway, which Spike was doing her level bloody best to not hear as they came from the other room, along with the sound of flesh on flesh, the slick noise of him plunging into her.

If you took the teeth out of the vamp that was Angel. Still all those things but now ashamed of it. And you just couldn’t respect someone who was so hung up on the bloody Slayer that he followed her around like a puppy dog doing her bidding. It was that sodding soul. By all rights, he could be the master of the Hellmouth, with his grandsire dusted, but he wasn’t, and no one thought of him that way. Demons didn’t respect vampires, and other vampires didn’t respect souls. So even though he could probably have beat whichever twit of the week was Sunnydale’s master — they came and went like anything because of the Slayer — he’d never tried.

Get that bloody soul out of him and he was making plans for it in a week. After the Slayer, of course. Then he’d challenge the current master, and he’d dust him, and then he’d _be_ the master.

It was a bit of a pickle, really. Spike couldn’t stand the bastard unsouled, not least because Dru hopped on his dick like it was the merry-go-round on Sunday as soon as he crooked his little finger at her. But souled, he wasn’t worth the meatsack he was animating. He’d been something, once. Something to look up to. The soul had made that impossible. Pathetic and a bit of a thorn in the side, but not great. Nothing great. Angelus _was_ great, and a great pillock, and was it worth it, to have the world as it should be, to have him here with them whole and unholy again?

Predictably, it was the end of the way the world should be that decided her.

Maybe more predictably, it was the Slayer.

**_Present day._ **

“Why, Clem,” she asked, “ _Why_ the bloody buggering _fuck_ would I want you to spread that around the sodding Hellmouth?”

Clem looked sheepish, and maybe a little contrite, but not scared, which in her opinion, he should be. Except of course she wouldn’t lay a finger on him, because _that_ would be _wrong_ and she didn’t need another nightmare. “I just mentioned it to my cousin when he asked how you were — ”

“And now the Slayer bleeding well knows,” she snarled.

“Was it a secret?”

She exploded. “Yes, it was a damned secret!”

She still wasn’t sure why, only she couldn’t take it if Buffy thought of her like Angel, but to explain that she’d gotten it because she wanted to be worthy of love was so pathetic that she cringed even thinking about it. There was a knock at the door before she could really tear into him, and while he answered it she kicked the couch she’d been sleeping on so viciously that one of the legs splintered.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” Willow asked, pushing past Clem in the doorway. Tara was behind her, and Spike suddenly realized she’d put good bloody money on her being the brains of this operation at the moment. “You got a soul.”

“Why the devil would I do that?” And Christ, now she’d reverted to posh swearing. Someone stake her.

“Your aura’s different,” Tara murmured. “It was when you came back. I mentioned it to Will, and then we saw — ”

“You!” Willow’s voice was high-pitched. “You got all wiggy when Xander started talking about souled vamps!”

“I didn’t — ” Tara looked at her. She sighed and gave in. “Fucking brilliant.”

“Does Buffy know?” Willow asked.

She put her face in her hands. “ _Nobody_ bloody well knows except you two and Angel and apparently half the demon population of the Hellmouth.”

Willow’s nose wrinkled. “Why not?”

Spike sank onto the now-lopsided couch. “It’s inside me now for good. Isn’t that enough?”

“For good?”

“No happiness loophole. Bit ironic, isn’t it? Throwing happiness away for this. I just know there’s a joke in there.” They didn’t laugh. Tara was looking at her with kind eyes, and all of a sudden she couldn’t stand it. “Get out,” she said. Snapped, really, and both of them recoiled. “Out.”

**_One year ago_**.

“Get out,” Buffy said. Snapped, really. Little manicured hands shoving at her chest, pushing her towards the door. This was how she always got when Spike pushed her luck just a little too far, nearly frantic to deny what she wanted. “Get out, get — ”

“So we can fuck in the open night air, Slayer, but not in your frilly, girly little bed?”

“We’re _not_ fucking!” The word sounded almost absurdly dirty when it came from that sweet pink mouth, in that righteous tone.

“Not right now,” Spike purred, and shouldered closer to her. “Nah, not right now, Buffy, but I can taste how wet you are for it. I reckon you’re thinking about it now. Letting me lay you out right on this staircase and fuck you blind. Look at those hot little eyes, love. So hungry for it you’re drooling.”

Buffy’s eyes flared, the way she had known they would. She hated it, hated to be reminded of the fact that when she touched her clit at night, it was a soulless evil thing that she was picturing above her. She’d never asked, because she knew it was too far, but she wondered if the girl had been thinking of Angelus inside her while he’d been off murdering that teacher. Because soulless evil things got her so het up she was almost panting with it. “Get out of my house right now,” Buffy hissed, furious. In denial. Spike could kiss her for her stubborn insistence that she didn’t want it. For thinking she was fooling anyone. “Right now or I’m going to be vacuuming you out of the carpet.”

“Who’d give it to you then, hmm?” she asked, but she stepped back towards the threshold anyway. Buffy wouldn’t stake her. Buffy hated her in some parts of her golden little heart, but she wouldn’t stake her. Spike knew it the same way she knew Angel was putting on his hair gel right now, or the way she knew that when the moon was in this position Drusilla would be dancing naked in the woods. The only trouble was, _Buffy_ didn’t know it, and as much as Spike would love to force her to realize it, it was likelier that would keep her away in terror for a few weeks than that it would make her notice that she felt something other than mindless lust.

Contempt on the pretty face. Rage and terror. Did Buffy even know how often she was scared these days? Ice in the voice. “I don’t need you, Spike.”

Spike stepped over the threshold and the door slammed in her face with such force that it rattled the window glass until it was singing. The final barb, to the closed door that she knew Buffy could hear her through: “See you at mine, pet.”

**_Present day._ **

Buffy showed up faster than Spike would have expected, given the other things on her plate. A few hours after the witches had exited. “Come in, Slayer,” she said, and stared at the ceiling, where a spider was spinning a web. Could you blame a spider for sucking insects dry? Could you blame it for being a predator in a world full of prey?

The difference was, she supposed, that the fly didn’t have a wife and kids and hopes and dreams, or if it did they weren’t worth much. “Willow said you got a soul,” Buffy said softly, not coming in past the doorway. “But I guess I wanted to hear it from you.”

“And everything burned in blue,” she intoned, without feeling. “Everything a star.”

“I know that one,” Buffy told her. “Neruda.” She hadn’t known him before, which meant in the interim she might have read him. She tried to imagine Buffy curled up with a book of love poetry in the middle of the apocalypse and wanted to kiss her. “But that wasn’t an answer.”

“Look ye well,” Spike murmured. But to her surprise, Buffy did it, walking over into the crypt to peer down at her with big green eyes like she could see the fucking thing clawing at her insides. There wasn’t any dawn of recognition in those eyes, exactly, but for the first time since Dru she felt like someone was cracking her open to see what was inside.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Buffy hadn’t looked away, and Spike was about to cry, she realized suddenly as the corners of her eyes pricked. “Christ, Buffy, how can you ask me that?”

Buffy blinked, clearly confused, and then her eyes took on a look of panic when she realized what was about to happen. Spike hid her face rather than let her see it, and took huge, deep breaths to chase away the feeling. “Spike,” Buffy said, and then paused again, for a long time. Then: “Did you do it for me?” she asked, her voice small. She looked like she didn’t want the answer to be yes, and of course she didn’t. Because that was the sort of thing that obligated you to a person, and Buffy had been keeping her head screwed on straight and not relying on Spike for anything other than her hands, and this had the potential to unscrew everything again. “So I’d — ”

“Let me,” Spike interrupted, almost frantic to stop her before she said it. “Let me just speak. Only for a moment. I didn’t do it for you and I know you think a soul makes all the difference, but it doesn’t.” That sounded unconvincing even to her own ears. “I wasn’t trying to turn into your perfect lover. I was trying to be good.” That was true, but it still sounded feeble. “ _Because of_ you, Buffy. Not _for_ you.” Buffy opened her mouth, and Spike waved her quiet. “I’ve had my second chance. And I did all right, didn’t I, until the end?”

“Yeah,” Buffy told her, voice so quiet it was nearly inaudible.

“I’m not looking for forgiveness or redemption or any of that rubbish. It’s not possible. I expect it’s all the Catholicism rotting his brain that has Angel thinking differently.”

Buffy didn’t find that funny. She never did find it funny when Spike made fun of her one true love, her golden boy. But she didn’t object much, either. She just looked at Spike and asked, “Are you sorry?”

Spike raised her face and smiled at her, and knew it looked wan. “Sorrier than I thought it was possible to be.”

“You shouldn’t have left,” Buffy told her.

“I know.”

“I’m still angry at you.”

“I know.”

“But I — ”

“Don’t, Buffy, please.” Her voice cracked. “I can’t bloody take it.” And she supposed that this was why she’d hidden it in the first place. Whatever tender bits of her there had been left before the soul hated to think that the soul was all that mattered. Little scraps of the thing that Cecily had destroyed, clinging on. Wanting to be loved. Her voice hardened, almost against her will. “I’m not Angel. All I want is to give you my hands.”

“I know,” Buffy said, and reached out for her.

And, in the end, Spike was too much love’s bitch to pull away.

**_Three months ago_**.

Buffy had a warrior’s hands. Broad calluses across the meat of the hand from where she held weapons. Short nails because they were practical, painted shiny pink because Dawn had liked the color. Square with muscle at the corner. Knuckles scraped bloody.

Spike took one of them between her hands and kissed the torn skin.

“Ugh,” Buffy said, but her mouth was twitching. “Vampires are so gross.”

“If I were gross I’d do _this_ ,” Spike informed her, and licked over the ridge of her fist just to hear her shriek and pull her hand back. She couldn’t restrain a smirk. “Love, you know I’ve had my tongue inside your arse. Not sure why you think knuckles are a bridge too far for me.”

“Thanks for reminding me that you just licked me with the tongue you’ve also put in my — ” Buffy broke off her righteous tirade, going scarlet.

“I’ve put it in your mouth, too,” Spike pointed out helpfully. “And for that matter it’s been inside an aorta or two in its day.”

“Vampires are _so gross_ ,” Buffy repeated, and wiggled her fingers like she was going to squirm away, only she didn’t. Just sat on the cemetery wall with her and started giggling.

“What is it, pet?”

“Did it hurt?” Buffy asked, obviously barely restraining herself from bursting into laughter again.

“What? Did what hurt?”

Buffy took her by the hand again and turned huge green eyes on her, lit from the inside with good humor. “When you crawled out of the grave?”

 _When you fell from heaven_. Spike rolled her eyes. “That was even worse than your usual, Slayer.”

**_Present day_**.

“Does it hurt?” Dawn asked.

Spike flinched at the sound of her voice and then growled, grabbing out a fag and lighting it, stepping away from her on the porch so that the smoke wouldn’t be too near her. “Of course they told you.”

Dawn shrugged. “Yeah. So, does it hurt?”

“You know how pearls are made?”

“What?”

“Teeny bugger gets into a clam, clam spits on it until it stops burning. Voila, pearl.”

“Spike, what are you talking about?” She crossed her long, gangly arms over her chest, frowning, and Spike remembered her pale little face after Buffy had died, the absent aching way she had stared at the wall of Revello Drive and fallen asleep against her shoulder on the couch.

“You take a string of pearls, love, and each of them has that little monster inside. Way deep down. The thing that burned.”

Dawn didn’t say anything, just stared at her like she could make the metaphor make sense if she looked long enough.

“Do you reckon it hurts a clam when you crack the pearl in half to get at that rotten little heart?”

“Are you the pearl?”

“No.”

“You made a lot more sense before,” Dawn told her matter-of-factly.

Spike took another drag, making sure to blow it away from Dawn. “It feels how it’s supposed to, Bit. What’s _your_ soul feel like?”

Dawn’s voice was dry. The girl was developing a Giles-esque sense of humor, which was odd with a Buffy-esque vocabulary. “Soul-y.”

“Me too,” she said, which didn’t quite capture it, and when she flicked her cigarette away and turned around, Buffy was standing there in the doorway, watching them.

When Dawn saw her, she rolled her eyes and ducked inside, as if she’d been summoned, although Buffy didn’t say a word until she’d left. “I never knew that about pearls.”

“Well, some say it’s a grain of sand. But I’ve broken loads of pearls in my day. Seems to me it’s a thing with teeth in there.”

Buffy wandered towards the porch railing, leaning against it next to Spike. “That’s the soul, huh? It has teeth?”

“Big bloody sharp ones.”

A nod. Buffy reached out to take her hand again, like it wasn’t anything. Like nothing much had passed between them, and tonight was just early spring with no end in sight. She smiled. Not a happy thing, exactly, just a stretch of teeth that said, _I'm here with you_. “Good thing you do too.”


End file.
